Traverses through a path and all its child directories recursively, and runs a function for each of the directories encountered.

Important: Symbolic links are not treated as directories, and walk will not follow them! You will need to identify and process them manually (see the example below).

Important: In Python 3, this function was removed in favor of os.walk().

Arguments

path: The base path. This is the starting directory to walk through. This path will be included in the results.

visit

A callback function to run for every (sub-)directory that is encountered. The function is called with the arguments (arg, dirname, names).

arg: The arg argument that is specified in the original call to os.path.walk. Useful for passing on arbitrary information that is necessary for processing the found (sub-)directories.

dirname: The path of the directory that was encountered. This is a full (absolute) path.

names: The names of all the items that were encountered in the directory. This includes sub-directories.

arg: An arbitrary extra argument that will be passed on to the specified callback function.

Return values

Always returns None.

Examples

Example: Using os.path.walk

Code:

def process_dir(arg, dirname, names):
	print "[%s] Found at %s: %s" % (arg, dirname, ", ".join(names))

os.path.walk("/home/sven/sample", process_dir, "Test")

Output:

[Test] Found at /home/sven/sample: testfile1.txt, testdir1, testdir2
[Test] Found at /home/sven/sample/testdir1: testfile4.txt, testfile3.txt, testdir1a
[Test] Found at /home/sven/sample/testdir1/testdir1a: testfile2.txt
[Test] Found at /home/sven/sample/testdir2: testfile5.txt

Example: Dealing with symlinks in os.path.walk

Code:

def process_dir(arg, dirname, names):
	for name in names:
		name_path = "%s/%s" % (dirname, name)
		if os.path.islink(name_path):
			os.path.walk(name_path, process_dir, arg)
	print "[%s] Found at %s: %s" % (arg, dirname, ", ".join(names))

os.path.walk("/home/sven/sample", process_dir, "Test")

Output:

[Test] Found at /home/sven/sample/testdir3: testfile5.txt
[Test] Found at /home/sven/sample: testfile1.txt, testdir3, testdir1, testdir2
[Test] Found at /home/sven/sample/testdir1: testfile4.txt, testfile3.txt, testdir1a
[Test] Found at /home/sven/sample/testdir1/testdir1a: testfile2.txt
[Test] Found at /home/sven/sample/testdir2: testfile5.txt