10 Organizing Files

Question 1

1. What does shutill stand for?
2. What is its structure?
3. What data type can shutil use?

Answer 1

1. shell utilities
2. shutil.copy(source, destination)
   shutil.copytree(… , …)
   shutil.move(
   shutil.remtree(path)
   –> after destination it is optional to use
   destination\newName.filetype
3. Both source and destination can be either strings or Path objects

Question 2

How can copy you the file spam.txt to another folder:

1. keeping its name
2. changing the name to spam2.txt
3. copy the whole folder (incl. subfolders & files)

Use the home path as your folder path

Answer 2

p = Path.home()

1. shutil.copy(p/spam.txt, new/path)
2. shutil.copy(p/spam.txt, new/path/spam2.txt)
3. shutil.copytree((p/spam, new/path/spamBackup)

Question 3

1. How can you move:
   C:\bacon.txt to C:\eggs?
2. What happens, if the folder eggs exists in the C:\ directory?
3. Wat happens if the folder eggs does NOT exist?
4. What happens if the file bacon.txt exists in the destination directory?

Answer 3

1. shutil.move(‘C:\bacon.txt’, ‘C:\eggs’)
2. Than bacon.txt is moved into C:\eggs
3. Than bacon.txt will be renamed as eggs (without the .txt extension!)
4. Than the existing file is overwritten
   
   • > Therefore, always be careful with move!

Question 4

How can you:

1. Delete a single file
2. Delete a folder empty of files/subflders
3. Delete a folder that is not empty?

Answer 4

1. Delete a single file
   os. unlink(path)
2. Delete a folder empty of files/subflders
   os. rmdir(path)
3. Delete a folder that is not empty?
   shutil. rmtree(path)

Question 5

1. Write a program to delete all .txt files in a folder
2. How could you pre-check which files are about to be deleted? For example, if you accidentally typed .rxt instead of .txt

Answer 5

> > > from pathlib import Path
import os, shutil

> > > for filename in Path.home().glob(‘*.rxt’):
&raquo_space;>os.unlink(filename)

2. Comment os.unlink and insert:
   &raquo_space;>print(filename)

Question 6

What is a much better way for deleting files? What is the downside?

Answer 6

Using the send2trash module, to prevent premanent deletion

> > > import send2trash
send2trash.send2trash(‘spam.txt’)

Downside: Doesn´t free up disk space

Question 7

How can you get to each file and subfolder of a folder easily? For example to rename them.

Answer 7

using the os.walk function, which always returns 3x values on each iteration, e.g.:

for folderName, subFolder, fileName in os.walk(path):
    print(folderName)
    for subfolders in subFolder:
          print(subfolders)
    for filenames in fileName:
          print(filenames)

The print functions can be replaced with any other custom code
Probably using os.path.join(sourcePath, filename) necessary