CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonglob
Trent Xavier
Trent Xavier

Reputation: 237

How do I find a directory on a system no matter where it is in python?

I have a series of scripts running for an automation project. One of the scripts creates a folder called "cloned_git_repo". The next script needs to look in that folder for the files to run conversions on. How can I get my Python script to automatically get to that folder to work from? This is the code:

result = [y for x in os.walk('/Users/user.name/Desktop/automation_project/cloned_git_repo') for y in glob(os.path.join(x[0], '*.csv'))]

Instead of hardcoding that directory path, how can I have it automatically get to the 'cloned_git_repo' and continue the rest of the program. It can't be hardcoded because different people on different machines will be running the script so '/Users/user.name/Desktop/automation_project/cloned_git_repo' will be different per machine. Thanks!

Upvotes: 1

Views: 130

Answers (1)

norok2
norok2

Reputation: 26886

What you would do is to access an environment variable, e.g. $HOME and your script would take over from that. This would be somewhat above Python (any script could do that).

In Python, you could use:

import os


HOME = os.getenv('HOME')

to get it.

A cleaner (and cross-platform) approach would be to use os.path.expanduser(), e.g.:

import os


HOME = os.path.expanduser('~')

In both case, you should get the /Users/user.name part of the path in HOME, and you can take it from there.

For example:

result = [
    y
    for x in os.walk('/Users/user.name/Desktop/automation_project/cloned_git_repo')
    for y in glob(os.path.join(x[0], '*.csv'))]

could become:

import os


HOME = os.path.expanduser('~')
result = [
    y
    for x in os.walk(os.path.join(HOME, 'Desktop/automation_project/cloned_git_repo'))
    for y in glob(os.path.join(x[0], '*.csv'))]

A more flexible approach would be to use a higher level package, e.g. appdir, which offers cross-platform methods for accessing a variety of standard paths.

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions