How to check a remote path is a file or a directory?

Question

I am using SFTPClient to download files from the remote server. However, I don't know if the remote path is a file or a directory. If the remote path is a directory, I need to handle this directory recursively.

This is my code:

def downLoadFile(sftp, remotePath, localPath):
    for file in sftp.listdir(remotePath):  
        if os.path.isfile(os.path.join(remotePath, file)): # file, just get
            try:
                sftp.get(file, os.path.join(localPath, file))
            except:
                pass
        elif os.path.isdir(os.path.join(remotePath, file)): # dir, need to handle recursive
            os.mkdir(os.path.join(localPath, file))
            downLoadFile(sftp, os.path.join(remotePath, file), os.path.join(localPath, file))

if __name__ == '__main__':
    paramiko.util.log_to_file('demo_sftp.log')
    t = paramiko.Transport((hostname, port))
    t.connect(username=username, password=password)
    sftp = paramiko.SFTPClient.from_transport(t)

I found the problem: The function os.path.isfile or os.path.isdir returns False. So, it looks like these functions can not work for remotePath.

Answer 1

os.path.isfile() and os.path.isdir() only work on local filenames.

I'd use the sftp.listdir_attr() function instead and load full SFTPAttributes objects, and inspect their st_mode attribute with the stat module utility functions:

import stat

def downLoadFile(sftp, remotePath, localPath):
    for fileattr in sftp.listdir_attr(remotePath):  
        if stat.S_ISDIR(fileattr.st_mode):
            sftp.get(fileattr.filename, os.path.join(localPath, fileattr.filename))