How do I run python script on specific folder

Question

I'm trying to run my python script against specific folder when I specify the folder name in the terminal eg

python script.py -'folder'

python script.py 'folder2'

'folder' being the I folder I would like to run the script in. Is there a command line switch that I must use?

Answer 1

The cd command in the shell switches your current directory.

Perhaps see also What exactly is current working directory?

If you would like your Python script to accept a directory argument, you'll have to implement the command-line processing yourself. In its simplest form, it might look something like

import sys

if len(sys.argv) == 1:
    mydir = '.'
else:
    mydir = sys.argv[1]

do_things_with(mydir)

Usually, you would probably wrap this in if __name__ == '__main__': etc and maybe accept more than one directory and loop over the arguments?

import sys
from os import scandir

def how_many_files(dirs):
    """
    Show the number of files in each directory in dirs
    """
    for adir in dirs:
        try:
            files = list(scandir(adir))
        except (PermissionError, FileNotFoundError) as exc:
            print('%s: %s' % (adir, exc), file=sys.stderr)
            continue
        print('%s: %i directory entries' % (adir, len(files)))

if __name__ == '__main__':
    how_many_files(sys.argv[1:] or ['.'])