How to copy directory recursively in python and overwrite all?

Question

I'm trying to copy /home/myUser/dir1/ and all its contents (and their contents, etc.) to /home/myuser/dir2/ in python. Furthermore, I want the copy to overwrite everything in dir2/.

It looks like distutils.dir_util.copy_tree might be the right tool for the job, but not sure if there's anything easier/more obvious to use for such a simple task.

If it is the right tool, how do I use it? According to the docs there are 8 parameters that it takes. Do I have to pass all 8 are just src, dst and update, and if so, how (I'm brand new to Python).

If there's something out there that's better, can someone give me an example and point me in the right direction? Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

You can use distutils.dir_util.copy_tree. It works just fine and you don't have to pass every argument, only src and dst are mandatory.

However in your case you can't use a similar tool likeshutil.copytree because it behaves differently: as the destination directory must not exist this function can't be used for overwriting its contents.

If you want to use the cp tool as suggested in the question comments beware that using the subprocess module is currently the recommended way for spawning new processes as you can see in the documentation of the os.system function.

Answer 2

Have a look at the shutil package, especially rmtree and copytree. You can check if a file / path exists with os.paths.exists(<path>).

import shutil import os  def copy_and_overwrite(from_path, to_path):     if os.path.exists(to_path):         shutil.rmtree(to_path)     shutil.copytree(from_path, to_path) 

Vincent was right about copytree not working, if dirs already exist. So distutils is the nicer version. Below is a fixed version of shutil.copytree. It's basically copied 1-1, except the first os.makedirs() put behind an if-else-construct:

import os from shutil import * def copytree(src, dst, symlinks=False, ignore=None):     names = os.listdir(src)     if ignore is not None:         ignored_names = ignore(src, names)     else:         ignored_names = set()      if not os.path.isdir(dst): # This one line does the trick         os.makedirs(dst)     errors = []     for name in names:         if name in ignored_names:             continue         srcname = os.path.join(src, name)         dstname = os.path.join(dst, name)         try:             if symlinks and os.path.islink(srcname):                 linkto = os.readlink(srcname)                 os.symlink(linkto, dstname)             elif os.path.isdir(srcname):                 copytree(srcname, dstname, symlinks, ignore)             else:                 # Will raise a SpecialFileError for unsupported file types                 copy2(srcname, dstname)         # catch the Error from the recursive copytree so that we can         # continue with other files         except Error, err:             errors.extend(err.args[0])         except EnvironmentError, why:             errors.append((srcname, dstname, str(why)))     try:         copystat(src, dst)     except OSError, why:         if WindowsError is not None and isinstance(why, WindowsError):             # Copying file access times may fail on Windows             pass         else:             errors.extend((src, dst, str(why)))     if errors:         raise Error, errors