how to list all files of a directory in python

Question

how to list all files of a directory in python, and add it to a list?

Answer 1

os.listdir("somedirectory")

will return a list of all the files in somedirectory.

Answer 2

http://docs.python.org/library/os.html#os.listdir

Answer 3

os.listdir() will get you everything that's in a directory - files and directories.

If you want just files, you could either filter this down using os.path

from os import listdir
from os.path import isfile, join
onlyfiles = [ f for f in listdir(mypath) if isfile(join(mypath,f)) ]

or you could use os.walk() which will yield 2 lists for each directory it visits - splitting into files and dirs for you. If you only want the top dir you can just break the first time it yields

f = []
for (dirpath, dirname, filenames) in walk(mypath):
    f.extend(filenames)
    break

And lastly, as that example shows, adding one list to another you can either use .extend() or

>>> q = [1,2,3]
>>> w = [4,5,6]
>>> q = q + w
>>> q
[1,2,3,4,5,6]

personally I prefer .extend()

Answer 4

I prefer using the glob module, as it does pattern matching and expansion.

import glob
print glob.glob("/home/adam/*.txt")

Will return a list with the queried files:

['/home/adam/file1.txt', '/home/adam/file2.txt', .... ]