Moving only one file of each sub directories to new sub directories

Question

I have question regarding moving one file in each sub directories to other new sub directories. So for example if I have directory as it shown in the image

And from that, I want to pick only the first file in each sub directories then move it to another new sub directories with the same name as you can see from the image. And this is my expected result

I have tried using os.walk to select the first file of each sub directories, but I still don't know how to move it to another sub directories with the same name

path = './test/'
new_path = './x/'

n = 1
fext = ".png"

for dirpath, dirnames, filenames in os.walk(path): 
    for filename in [f for f in filenames if f.endswith(fext)][:n]:
        print(filename) #this only print the file name in each sub dir

The expected result can be seen in the image above

Where are the new subdirectories in your result? It looks like you deleted the second file rather than moving the first file. — Barmar, Jul 10 '19 at 21:43
See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8858008/how-to-move-a-file-in-python for how to move a file. — Barmar, Jul 10 '19 at 21:47
@Prune No need to use the shell, Python has `os.rename()` and `shutil.move()`. — Barmar, Jul 10 '19 at 21:48
Yup -- much better. I'm blinded by my own coding problems ... :-) — Prune, Jul 10 '19 at 21:49
Sorry, the directory in the second image should be 'x' as you can see in the code that I provided @Barmar — Bob Adi Setiawan, Jul 11 '19 at 04:38

VictorDDT · Answer 1 · 2019-07-11T21:40:20.053

You are almost there :)

All you need is to have both full path of file: an old path (existing file) and a new path (where you want to move it).

As it mentioned in this post you can move files in different ways in Python. You can use "os.rename" or "shutil.move".

Here is a full tested code-sample:

import os, shutil

path = './test/'
new_path = './x/'

n = 1
fext = ".png"

for dirpath, dirnames, filenames in os.walk(path): 
    for filename in [f for f in filenames if f.endswith(fext)][:n]:
        print(filename) #this only print the file name in each sub dir

        filenameFull = os.path.join(dirpath, filename)
        new_filenameFull = os.path.join(new_path, filename)

        # if new directory doesn't exist - you create it recursively
        if not os.path.exists(new_path):
            os.makedirs(new_path)        

        # Use "os.rename"
        #os.rename(filenameFull, new_filenameFull)

        # or use "shutil.move"
        shutil.move(filenameFull, new_filenameFull)

I tried this but it only moves the file and not create a sub directory as in my image above — Bob Adi Setiawan, Jul 11 '19 at 04:39
It's not a problem. I've updated my code with an additional block. You can create a dir if it doesn't exist. — VictorDDT, Jul 11 '19 at 21:41

Moving only one file of each sub directories to new sub directories

1 Answers1