[Python-Dev] A smarter shutil.copytree ?

[Guido van Rossum]

Sounds like a neat little feature. Looking forward to it. Maybe the
most useful use case would be to provide glob-style patterns for
skipping files or directories (and their contents).

--Guido

On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 9:52 AM, Tarek Ziadé <ziade.tarek at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
>  shutil.copytree is very convenient to make recursive copies, but
>  os.walk has to be used everytime some filtering
>  has to be done on the files copied., if you want to avoid copying some files.
>
>  The code pattern with os.walk is pretty talkative :
>
>  --------------------- copying a source folder to a target folder, but
>  the pyc/pyo files
>  os.mkdir(target)
>  for root, dirs, filenames in os.walk(source):
>     root_target = root.replace(source, target)
>     for dir_ in dirs:
>         target_dir = join(root_target, dir_)
>         if os.path.exists(target_dir):
>             continue
>         os.mkdir(target_dir)
>     for filename in filenames:
>         filename_source = join(root, filename)
>         filename_target = join(root_target, filename)
>         if (os.path.exists(filename_target) or
>             os.path.splitext(filename) in ('.pyc', '.pyo')):
>             continue
>         shutil.copyfile(filename_source, filename_target)
>  --------------------
>
>  If we could provide a callable argument to shutil.copytree, this would
>  allow simplifying a lot the code:
>
>  --------------------- copying a source to a target, but the pyc/pyo file
>  def filtering(source, target):
>     return os.path.splitext(filename) not in ('.pyc', '.pyo')
>
>  shutil.copytree(source, target, filter_=filtering)
>  ---------------------
>
>  This is a very current pattern in my code, and I think this could be
>  an interesting enhancement to
>  shutil. So if people think it is a good idea, I can work on a patch
>  and submit it to the tracker.
>
>  Regards
>
>  Tarek
>
>  --
>  Tarek Ziadé | Association AfPy | www.afpy.org
>  Blog FR | http://programmation-python.org
>  Blog EN | http://tarekziade.wordpress.com/
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-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)