How do I read the number of files in a folder using Python?

Question

How do I read the number of files in a specific folder using Python? Example code would be awesome!

Answer 1

To count files and directories non-recursively you can use os.listdir and take its length.

To count files and directories recursively you can use os.walk to iterate over the files and subdirectories in the directory.

If you only want to count files not directories you can use os.listdir and os.path.file to check if each entry is a file:

import os.path
path = '.'
num_files = len([f for f in os.listdir(path)
                if os.path.isfile(os.path.join(path, f))])

Or alternatively using a generator:

num_files = sum(os.path.isfile(os.path.join(path, f)) for f in os.listdir(path))

Or you can use os.walk as follows:

len(os.walk(path).next()[2])

I found some of these ideas from this thread.