randomly choose 100 documents under a directory

Question

There are about 2000 documents under the directory. I want to randomly select some documents and copy them to a new directory automatically.

Some relevant information about generating one document name under a certain directory.

Answer 1

Try:

import shutil, random, os
dirpath = 'your/read/location'
destDirectory = 'your/destination'

filenames = random.sample(os.listdir(dirpath), 100)
for fname in filenames:
    srcpath = os.path.join(dirpath, fname)
    shutil.copyfile(srcpath, destDirectory)

Answer 2

import shutil, random, os
dirpath = 'your/read/location'
destDirectory = 'your/destination'

filenames = random.sample(os.listdir(dirpath), 100)
for fname in filenames:
    srcpath = os.path.join(dirpath, fname)
    destPath = os.path.join(destDirectory, fname)
    shutil.copyfile(srcpath, destPath)

Based off the answer by @inspectorG4dget (and edited by @olinox14), I found this minor adjustment worked best for my situation. I kept getting a 'IsDirectoryError' from shutil.copyfile() so I checked out the docs and realized the function copies to files (not directories). This adjustment preserves the filename in a new directory.