Rename and move file with Python

Question

I have a Python script that compares existing file names in a folder to a reference table and then determines if it needs to be renamed or not.

As it loops through each filename:

'oldname' = the current file name  'newname' = what it needs to be renamed to 

I want rename the file and move it to a new folder "..\renamedfiles"

Can I do the rename and the move at the same time as it iterates through the loop?

Answer 1

Yes you can do this. In Python you can use the move function in shutil library to achieve this.

Let's say on Linux, you have a file in /home/user/Downloads folder named "test.txt" and you want to move it to /home/user/Documents and also change the name to "useful_name.txt". You can do both things in the same line of code:

import shutil  shutil.move('/home/user/Downloads/test.txt', '/home/user/Documents/useful_name.txt') 

In your case you can do this:

import shutil  shutil.move('oldname', 'renamedfiles/newname')