is there a better way to walk a file system?

[George Sakkis]

"Peter Hansen" wrote:

> ina wrote:
> > I want to walk a folder structor and group all the files by extention.
>
> > Here is the code I put together is there a better way of doing this?
> > <code>
>
> [snip]
>
> If you were to download Jason Orendorff's "path" module, which is a
> convenient single-file package that vastly simplifies all manner of
> dealings with directory and file names, I suspect your example code
> could be reduced to less than half the number of lines it now uses, and
> with a corresponding increase in readability and maintainability.

Well, it's exactly half non-blank lines (10) and still readable; of
course it can be compressed more but we're not doing perl here <wink>.

import sys
from path import path
from itertools import groupby

def getExtension(aPath):
    return aPath.ext

root = len(sys.argv) > 1 and sys.argv[1] or '.'
for ext,iterFiles in groupby(sorted(path(root).walkfiles(),
                                    key=getExtension),
                             getExtension):
    print "%s: %d files" % (ext, len(tuple(iterFiles)))


By the way, from this example I discovered that properties cannot be
unbound, i.e. using path.ext instead of getExtension raises TypeError.
Couldn't/shouldn't Class.prop(instance) be allowed as equivalent of
instance.prop, just as methods ?

> The answer to the question "is there a better way of doing this?" in
> relation to paths is always "yes, use Jason Orendorff's path module".
> 
> -Peter 

George