How do I copy a file in Python?

Question

How do I copy a file in Python?

I couldn\'t find anything under os.

Answer 1

copy2(src,dst) is often more useful than copyfile(src,dst) because:

• it allows dst to be a directory (instead of the complete target filename), in which case the basename of src is used for creating the new file;
• it preserves the original modification and access info (mtime and atime) in the file metadata (however, this comes with a slight overhead).

Here is a short example:

import shutil
shutil.copy2('/src/dir/file.ext', '/dst/dir/newname.ext') # complete target filename given
shutil.copy2('/src/file.ext', '/dst/dir') # target filename is /dst/dir/file.ext

Answer 2

You can use one of the copy functions from the shutil package:

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Function              preserves     supports          accepts     copies other
                      permissions   directory dest.   file obj    metadata  
――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――
shutil.copy              ✔             ✔                 ☐           ☐
shutil.copy2             ✔             ✔                 ☐           ✔
shutil.copyfile          ☐             ☐                 ☐           ☐
shutil.copyfileobj       ☐             ☐                 ✔           ☐
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Example:

import shutil
shutil.copy('/etc/hostname', '/var/tmp/testhostname')

Answer 3

Directory and File copy example - From Tim Golden's Python Stuff:

http://timgolden.me.uk/python/win32_how_do_i/copy-a-file.html

import os
import shutil
import tempfile

filename1 = tempfile.mktemp (".txt")
open (filename1, "w").close ()
filename2 = filename1 + ".copy"
print filename1, "=>", filename2

shutil.copy (filename1, filename2)

if os.path.isfile (filename2): print "Success"

dirname1 = tempfile.mktemp (".dir")
os.mkdir (dirname1)
dirname2 = dirname1 + ".copy"
print dirname1, "=>", dirname2

shutil.copytree (dirname1, dirname2)

if os.path.isdir (dirname2): print "Success"

Answer 4

shutil has many methods you can use. One of which is:

from shutil import copyfile
copyfile(src, dst)

• Copy the contents of the file named src to a file named dst.
• The destination location must be writable; otherwise, an IOError exception will be raised.
• If dst already exists, it will be replaced.
• Special files such as character or block devices and pipes cannot be copied with this function.
• With copy, src and dst are path names given as strings.

If you use os.path operations, use copy rather than copyfile. copyfile will only accept strings.

Answer 5

For small files and using only python built-ins, you can use the following one-liner:

with open(source, 'rb') as src, open(dest, 'wb') as dst: dst.write(src.read())

As @maxschlepzig mentioned in the comments below, this is not optimal way for applications where the file is too large or when memory is critical, thus Swati's answer should be preferred.

Answer 6

from subprocess import call
call("cp -p <file> <file>", shell=True)