Moving half of the files from one directory into another-CodePudding

I am new to Python, and I am trying to use shutil to move files from one directory to another. I understand how to do this for one file or for the entire directory, but how can I do this if I want to only move some of the files. For example, if I have a directory of 50 files and I only want to move half of those 25. Is there a way to specify them instead of doing

shutil.move(source, destination)

25 times?

CodePudding user response：

Specify the files you want to move into a collection such as a list, and then if after Python 3.4, you can also use pathlib's class Path to move file.

from pathlib import Path
SRC_DIR = "/src-dir"
DST_DIR = "/dst-dir"

FILES_TO_MOVE = ["file1", "file2", "file3", ..]

for file in FILES_TO_MOVE:
    Path(f"{SRC_DIR}/{file}").rename(f"{DST_DIR}/{file}")

https://docs.python.org/3.4/library/pathlib.html#pathlib.Path.rename

CodePudding user response：

shutil.move() takes a single file or directory for an argument, so you can't move more than one at a time. However, this is what loops are for!

Basically, first generate a list of files in the directory using os.listdir(), then loop through half the list, moving each file, like so:

import os, shutil

srcPath = './oldPath/'
destPath = './newPath/'
files = os.listdir(srcPath)

for file in files[:len(files)//2]:
    shutil.move(srcPath   file, destPath   file)

You didn't mention what to do if there was an odd number of files which didn't divide evenly, so I rounded down. You can round up by adding 1 after the integer division.

One caveat with that code, it will move half the items in the directory, including subdirectories. If you have only files, there will be no effect, but if there is, and you don't want to move subdirectories, you'll want to remove the subdirectories from the "files" list first.