A very common task for any script is to look for files on the system. My go to method when globbing for files in python is to use pathlib.
Setup
I setup a directory to make some examples about globbing. Here is what the directory looks like.
❯ tree .
.
├── content
│ ├── hello.md
│ ├── hello.py
│ ├── me.md
│ └── you.md
├── readme.md
├── README.md
├── READMES.md
└── setup.py
1 directory, 8 files
Pathlib
Pathlib is a standard library module available in all LTS versions of python at this point.
❯ from pathlib import Path
Creating a Path instance.
# current working directory
Path() Path.cwd()
# The users home directory
Path.home()
# Path to a directory by string
Path('/path/to/directory')
# The users ~/.config directory
Path.home() / '.config'
Globbing Examples
The path object has a glob method that allows you to glob for files with a unix style glob pattern to search for files. Note that it gives you a generator. This is great for many use cases, but for examples its easier to turn them to a list to print them out.
If you need some more detail on what globbing is there is a wikipedia article discussing it. I am just showing how to glob with pathlib.
❯ Path().glob("**/*.md")
<generator object Path.glob at 0x7fa35adc4f90>
❯ list(Path().glob("**/*.md"))
[
PosixPath('readme.md'),
PosixPath('READMES.md'),
PosixPath('README.md'),
PosixPath('content/you.md'),
PosixPath('content/me.md'),
PosixPath('content/hello.md')
]
❯ list(Path().glob("**/*.py"))
[PosixPath('setup.py'), PosixPath('content/hello.py')]
❯ list(Path().glob("*.md"))
[PosixPath('readme.md'), PosixPath('READMES.md'), PosixPath('README.md')]
❯ list(Path().glob("*.py"))
[PosixPath('setup.py')]
❯ list(Path().glob("**/*hello*"))
[PosixPath('content/hello.py'), PosixPath('content/hello.md')]
❯ list(Path().glob("**/REA?ME.md"))
[PosixPath('README.md')]
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