Ben Chuanlong Du's Blog

It is never too late to learn.

Hands on the Python module shutil

https://docs.python.org/3/library/shutil.html

In [1]:
import shutil

Copy Files

copy2 is the preferred function to copy files as it is more flexible (than copy) and also preserve file metadata (compared to copyfile).

copyfileobj

copyfile

https://docs.python.org/3/library/shutil.html#shutil.copyfile

copymode

https://docs.python.org/3/library/shutil.html#shutil.copymode

copystat

https://docs.python.org/3/library/shutil.html#shutil.copystat

copy

https://docs.python.org/3/library/shutil.html#shutil.copy

shutil.copy2

https://docs.python.org/3/library/shutil.html#shutil.copy2

shutil.copy2 siliently overwrite the destination file if it already exists, which is consistent with the behavior of the cpcomamnd in Linux/Unix.

In [2]:
!touch abc
In [3]:
!echo "testing" > test
In [4]:
shutil.copy2("test", "abc")
Out[4]:
'abc'
In [5]:
!cat abc

testing

shutil.copytree

https://docs.python.org/3/library/shutil.html#shutil.copytree

shutil.copytree copies the content of the source directory to the destination directory.

In [1]:
!rm -rf test1 && mkdir -p test1 && touch test1/1.txt && ls test1/

1.txt
In [2]:
!rm -rf test2 && mkdir -p test2 && touch test2/2.txt && ls test2/

2.txt
In [4]:
shutil.copytree("test1/", "test2/", dirs_exist_ok=True)
Out[4]:
'test2/'
In [5]:
!ls test2/

1.txt  2.txt

Below is an example of copying ~/.ssh to another location /tmp/ssh but skipping sockets.

In [ ]:
def _ignore_socket(dir_, files):
    dir_ = Path(dir_)
    return [file for file in files if (dir_ / file).is_socket()]


shutil.copytree(Path.home() / ".ssh", "/tmp/ssh", ignore=_ignore_socket)

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