How do you copy files from one location to another?

[John Salerno]

On Jun 17, 5:15 pm, Ethan Furman <et... at stoneleaf.us> wrote:
> John Salerno wrote:
> > On Jun 17, 2:23 pm, Terry Reedy <tjre... at udel.edu> wrote:
>
> >> If you follow the second part of Greg's suggestion 'or one of the other
> >> related function in the shutil module', you will find copytree()
> >> "Recursively copy an entire directory tree rooted at src. "
>
> > Yeah, but shutil.copytree says:
>
> > "The destination directory, named by dst, must not already exist"
>
> > which again brings me back to the original problem. All I'm looking
> > for is a simple way to copy files from one location to another,
> > overwriting as necessary, but there doesn't seem to be a single
> > function that does just that.
>
> If you don't mind deleting what's already there:
>
> shutil.rmtree(...)
> shutil.copytree(...)
>
> If you do mind, roll your own (or borrow ;):
>
> 8<-------------------------------------------------------------------
> #stripped down and modified version from 2.7 shutil (not tested)
> def copytree(src, dst):
>      names = os.listdir(src)
>      if not os.path.exists(dst):  # no error if already exists
>          os.makedirs(dst)
>      errors = []
>      for name in names:
>          srcname = os.path.join(src, name)
>          dstname = os.path.join(dst, name)
>          try:
>              if os.path.isdir(srcname):
>                  copytree(srcname, dstname, symlinks, ignore)
>              else:
>                  copy2(srcname, dstname)
>          except (IOError, os.error), why:
>              errors.append((srcname, dstname, str(why)))
>          # catch the Error from the recursive copytree so that we can
>          # continue with other files
>          except Error, err:
>              errors.extend(err.args[0])
>      if errors:
>          raise Error(errors)
> 8<-------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> ~Ethan~

Thanks. Deleting what is already there is not a problem, I was just
hoping to have it overwritten without any extra steps, but that's no
big deal.