Python Fabric: How to retrieve a filelist of a dir

Question

I'm building a remote server admin tool using the python-fabric library and am looking for a good way of retrieving a filelist for a directory on the remote server. Currently I'm using run("ls dir") and am manually splitting the return string, which seems horrendous and very much architecture dependent. fabric.contrib.files doesn't seem to contain anything of use..

Suggestions much appreciated.

Cheers, R

Answer 1

I think the best way is to write a BASH (others shells behave similar) oneliner. To retrieve list of files in a directory.

for i in *; do echo $i; done

So the complete solution that returns absolute paths:

from fabric.api import env, run, cd

env.hosts = ["localhost"]
def list_dir(dir_=None):
    """returns a list of files in a directory (dir_) as absolute paths"""
    dir_ = dir_ or env.cwd
    string_ = run("for i in %s*; do echo $i; done" % dir_)
    files = string_.replace("\r","").split("\n")
    print files
    return files

def your_function():
    """docstring"""
    with cd("/home/"):
        list_dir()

Answer 2

What's wrong with this?

output = run('ls /path/to/files')
files = output.split()
print files

Check the documentation on run() for more tricks.