See also the globbing in the Shell section of this guide.

Resources

  • glob in the Python 3 docs.

How to get a list files in a directory

From this StackOverflow page, where my answer was the highest voted.

File paths

Provide a path as a single argument. You get results as absolute paths.

glob.glob("some_dir/*.png")
# => ['/home/michael/foo/bar/some_dir/a.png', '/home/michael/foo/baz/some_dir/b.png', ]

In this example, the current working directory was above some_dir, but you could change directory first and then run the glob using the short pattern *.png.

Filenames

use a different method and provide two arguments as glob1(dirname, pattern). You get results as filenames only.

glob.glob1("some_dir", "*.png")
# => ['a.png', 'a.png', ...]

Dotfiles

“Dotfiles” which start with a dot are not picked up using a star pattern (as in the shell if you did ls *). But, you can specify a leading dot.

glob.glob('.c*')
# => ['.foo.bar']

Functions

Summary of use

glob

Return a list of paths matching a pathname pattern.

glob(path)
# e.g.
glob("foo/*.txt")
# => [ "foo/a.txt", "foo/b.txt" ]

glob0

For convenience to split directory and pattern. Note dirname cannot be * and neither can pattern.

glob0(dirname, pattern)
# e.g.
glob0("foo", "*.txt")
# => [ ]
glob0("foo", "a.txt")
# => [ 'a.txt', 'b.txt' ]

glob1

For convenience to split directory and pattern. Note dirname cannot be *.

glob1(dirname, pattern)
# e.g.
glob1("foo", "*.txt")
# => [ 'a.txt', 'b.txt' ]

glob function

glob.glob(pathname, *, recursive=False)

Return a possibly-empty list of path names that match pathname, which must be a string containing a path specification. pathname

can be either absolute (like /usr/src/Python-1.5/Makefile) or relative (like ../../Tools//.gif),

and can contain shell-style wildcards.

If recursive is true, the pattern “**” will match any files and zero or more directories, subdirectories and symbolic links to directories.

Note: Using the “**” pattern in large directory trees may consume an inordinate amount of time.

iglob function

glob.iglob(pathname, *, recursive=False)

Return an iterator which yields the same values as glob() without actually storing them all simultaneously.

Escape

escape(pathname)

Escape all special characters.

Helper functions

From glob.py in CPython on GitHub.

The glob module defines these public functions:

__all__ = ["glob", "iglob", "escape"]

But glob0 and glob1 are also available.

e.g.

import glob
glob.glob0(...)
from glob import glob0
glob0(...)