Recursively move all files on subdirectories to another directory in Python

Question

The title explains what I am after. Note that the sub directories won't contain any directories only files (*.JPG). Essentially, just moving everything up one level in the file tree.

For example, from ~/someDir/folder1/* , ~/someDir/folder2/* , ... , ~/someDir/folderN/* . I want all of the contents of the sub directories brought up to ~/someDir/ .

Answer 1

shutil.move is a good option to move files.

import shutil
import os

source = "/parent/subdir"
destination = "/parent/"
files_list = os.listdir(source)
for files in files_list:
    shutil.move(files, destination)

For Recursive move, you can try shutil.copytree(SOURCE, DESTINATION) . it just copies all files and if needed you can manually cleanup the source directory.

Answer 2

Use the shutil module.

Official documentation:

https://docs.python.org/3/library/shutil.html#module-shutil

Answer 3

Also, You can achieve something similar using Pathlib .

from pathlib import Path
def _move_all_subfolder_files_to_main_folder(folder_path: Path):
    """
    This function will move all files in all subdirectories to the folder_path dir.
    folder_path/
        1/
            file1.jpg
            file2.jpg
        2/ 
            file4.jpg
    outputs:
    folder_path/
        file1.jpg
        file2.jpg
        file4.jpg
    """
    if not folder_path.is_dir():
        return

    for subfolder in folder_path.iterdir():
        for file in subfolder.iterdir():
            file.rename(folder_path / file.name)

Usage would be:

_move_all_subfolder_files_to_main_folder(Path('my_path_to_main_folder'))

Answer 4

Use this, if the files have same names, new names will have folder names joined by '_'

import shutil
import os

source = 'path to folder'

def recursive_copy(path):

    for f in sorted(os.listdir(os.path.join(os.getcwd(), path))):

        file = os.path.join(path, f)

        if os.path.isfile(file):

            temp = os.path.split(path)
            f_name = '_'.join(temp)
            file_name = f_name + '_' + f
            shutil.move(file, file_name)

        else:

            recursive_copy(file)
         
recursive_copy(source)

Answer 5

Here is modified way of doing along with a duplicate check:

src = r'D:\TestSourceFolder'
dst = r'D:\TestDestFolder'


for root, subdirs, files in os.walk(src):
    for file in files:
        path = os.path.join(root, file)
        
        print("Found a file: "+path)
        print("Only name of the file: "+file)
        print("Will be moved to: "+os.path.join(dst, file))
        
        # If there is no duplicate file present, then move else don't move
        if not os.path.exists(os.path.join(dst, file)):  
            #shutil.move(path, os.path.join(dst, os.path.relpath(path, src)))
            shutil.move(path, os.path.join(dst, file) )
            print("1 File moved : "+file+"\n")
        else:
            print("1 File not moved because duplicate file found at: "+path+"\n")