How to get all of the immediate subdirectories in Python

I'm trying to write a simple Python script that will copy a index.tpl to index.html in all of the subdirectories (with a few exceptions).

I'm getting bogged down by trying to get the list of subdirectories.

Solution 1:

import os
def get_immediate_subdirectories(a_dir):
    return [name for name in os.listdir(a_dir)
            if os.path.isdir(os.path.join(a_dir, name))]

Solution 2:

I did some speed testing on various functions to return the full path to all current subdirectories.

tl;dr: Always use scandir:

list_subfolders_with_paths = [f.path for f in os.scandir(path) if f.is_dir()]

Bonus: With scandir you can also simply only get folder names by using f.name instead of f.path.

This (as well as all other functions below) will not use natural sorting. This means results will be sorted like this: 1, 10, 2. To get natural sorting (1, 2, 10), please have a look at https://stackoverflow.com/a/48030307/2441026

Results: scandir is: 3x faster than walk, 32x faster than listdir (with filter), 35x faster than Pathlib and 36x faster than listdir and 37x (!) faster than glob.

Scandir:           0.977
Walk:              3.011
Listdir (filter): 31.288
Pathlib:          34.075
Listdir:          35.501
Glob:             36.277

Tested with W7x64, Python 3.8.1. Folder with 440 subfolders.
In case you wonder if listdir could be speed up by not doing os.path.join() twice, yes, but the difference is basically nonexistent.

Code:

import os
import pathlib
import timeit
import glob

path = r"<example_path>"



def a():
    list_subfolders_with_paths = [f.path for f in os.scandir(path) if f.is_dir()]
    # print(len(list_subfolders_with_paths))


def b():
    list_subfolders_with_paths = [os.path.join(path, f) for f in os.listdir(path) if os.path.isdir(os.path.join(path, f))]
    # print(len(list_subfolders_with_paths))


def c():
    list_subfolders_with_paths = []
    for root, dirs, files in os.walk(path):
        for dir in dirs:
            list_subfolders_with_paths.append( os.path.join(root, dir) )
        break
    # print(len(list_subfolders_with_paths))


def d():
    list_subfolders_with_paths = glob.glob(path + '/*/')
    # print(len(list_subfolders_with_paths))


def e():
    list_subfolders_with_paths = list(filter(os.path.isdir, [os.path.join(path, f) for f in os.listdir(path)]))
    # print(len(list(list_subfolders_with_paths)))


def f():
    p = pathlib.Path(path)
    list_subfolders_with_paths = [x for x in p.iterdir() if x.is_dir()]
    # print(len(list_subfolders_with_paths))



print(f"Scandir:          {timeit.timeit(a, number=1000):.3f}")
print(f"Listdir:          {timeit.timeit(b, number=1000):.3f}")
print(f"Walk:             {timeit.timeit(c, number=1000):.3f}")
print(f"Glob:             {timeit.timeit(d, number=1000):.3f}")
print(f"Listdir (filter): {timeit.timeit(e, number=1000):.3f}")
print(f"Pathlib:          {timeit.timeit(f, number=1000):.3f}")

Solution 3:

Why has no one mentioned glob? glob lets you use Unix-style pathname expansion, and is my go to function for almost everything that needs to find more than one path name. It makes it very easy:

from glob import glob
paths = glob('*/')

Note that glob will return the directory with the final slash (as unix would) while most path based solutions will omit the final slash.

Solution 4:

Check "Getting a list of all subdirectories in the current directory".

Here's a Python 3 version:

import os

dir_list = next(os.walk('.'))[1]

print(dir_list)