Help please with code to find and move files.

[inFocus at sl.com]

On Sun, 30 Dec 2007 19:29:38 -0800 (PST), John Machin
<sjmachin at lexicon.net> wrote:

>On Dec 31, 1:04 pm, inFo... at sl.com wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I am new to python and wanted to write something for myself where
>> after inputing two words it would search entire drive and when finding
>> both names in files name would either copy or move thoe files to a
>> specified directory.
>>
>> But couple of attempts did not work as desired this is one of them.
>
>Care to provide some more details than "did not work as desired"? Do
>you think the problem is in the finding or in the copying? I've given
>some comments below, but you really need to think through what "as
>desired" means ...
>
>Suppose your search words are "foo" and "bar", that C:\files is an
>empty folder, and the following 3 files exist:
>C:\a\foobar.txt
>C:\b\foobar.txt
>C:\b\barfoo.txt
>
>What do you want to happen the first time you run the script? ... if
>you run it a second time? If it's your intention not to make a copy of
>C:\b\foobar.txt (because its "basename" is the same as that of C:\a
>\foobar.txt), consider the desirability of warning yourself when this
>situation happens.
>
>> Could someone help fix it or maybe give a better example.
>>
>>  Thank you very much.
>>
>> import os, os.path, shutil
>>
>> path = r"c:\\"
>
>Leave out the "r"; you are getting TWO backslashes:
>
>>>> path = r"c:\\"
>>>> len(path)
>4
>>>>>>> import os
>>>> wkr = os.walk('rd:\\')
>>>> wkr.next()
>Traceback (most recent call last):
>  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
>StopIteration
># Nothing inside your for statement would be executed
>>>> wkr = os.walk('d:\\')
>>>> wkr.next()
>('d:\\', a list of folders, a list of files)
>
>
>> dest_file = 'C:\\files'
>
>Presumably that would be better named dest_dir ...
>
>> name_search = raw_input('Please enter name searchs : ').split()
>> dup = []
>
>In the (unlikely) event that an in-memory structure with no knowledge
>of what happened on previous runs will do what you really want to do,
>then consider a set instead of a list.
>
>>
>> for root, dirs, files in os.walk(path):
>>     for name in files:
>>                 file_name = os.path.join(root, name)
>>                 if (name_search[0] in file_name) and (name_search[1]
>> in file_name):
>>                         #if os.path.join(root, name) in dest_file:
>>                         if file_name in dup:
>
>What do you really intend to do here? dup contains the FULL PATH of
>each file that you have found; if you come across another instance of
>one of those, either os.walk is horribly broken or your filesystem has
>a loop in its directory structure.
>
>If you really mean "am I about to try to copy over the top of an
>existing file", attack the problem head-on: make the full path of the
>file you are about to try to create, and use os.path.exists on it.
>
>>                                 break
>
>Why break?
>
>You also want to avoid trying to copy files in the backup
>("dest_file") directory, perhaps including ones that you have just
>copied there. Try a simple test
>    if root == dest_file:
>        continue
>very early in your outer loop. It's probably a good idea to wrap
>os.path.abspath() around root and destfile.
>
>>                         else:
>>                                 print "copied %s to %s" % (name,
>> dest_file)
>>                                 shutil.copy(os.path.join(root, name),
>> dest_file)
>
>You may prefer the results of copy2 to those of copy.
>
>>                                 dup.append(file_name)
>
>HTH,
>John

John,

What I was trying to do is find files that are scattered all over my
hard drive that contain similar two words in them like bar and foo 
and move them to one desired location removing from where they were
originally.  The did not work as desired were attempts when it would
attempt to read and write to the same location.so i would get an error
saying that source and destination were  the same.