List directories with a specified depth in Python

Question

I'm want a function to return a list with directories with a specified path and a fixed depth and soon realized there a few alternatives. I'm using os.walk quite a lot but the code started to look ugly when counting the depth etc.

What is really the most "neat" implementation?

Answer 1

If the depth is fixed, glob is a good idea:

import glob,os.path filesDepth3 = glob.glob('*/*/*') dirsDepth3 = filter(lambda f: os.path.isdir(f), filesDepth3) 

Otherwise, it shouldn't be too hard to use os.walk:

import os,string path = '.' path = os.path.normpath(path) res = [] for root,dirs,files in os.walk(path, topdown=True):     depth = root[len(path) + len(os.path.sep):].count(os.path.sep)     if depth == 2:         # We're currently two directories in, so all subdirs have depth 3         res += [os.path.join(root, d) for d in dirs]         dirs[:] = [] # Don't recurse any deeper print(res) 

Answer 2

This is not exactly neat, but under UNIX-like OS, you could also rely on a system tool like "find", and just execute it as an external program, for example:

from subprocess import call call(["find", "-maxdepth", "2", "-type", "d"]) 

You can then redirect the output to some string variable for further handling.