I am using Python Paramiko to retrieve/search file from an SFTP server. I get all file in the directory.
What I need is specific file from that directory. How do I get it?
I am using Python Paramiko to retrieve/search file from an SFTP server. I get all file in the directory.
What I need is specific file from that directory. How do I get it?
Use Paramiko SFTPClient.get
to download a single file:
with paramiko.SSHClient() as ssh:
ssh.connect(host, username=username, password=password)
with ssh.open_sftp() as sftp:\
sftp.get("/remote/path/file.txt", "/local/path/file.txt")
You will also have to deal with the server's host key verification.
What you need to do is create an ssh client, then execute an ls
with piped grep
to find your file. such as ls /srv/ftp | grep '^FTP_'
to find files in the /srv/ftp
directory and start with FTP
. Then open an sftp connection and execute the get
command to bring the files over.
EDIT: Martin below mentioned that there is a better way to get the directory contents using SFTPClient.listdir() - I have revised to that method. More info in the docs: https://docs.paramiko.org/en/stable/api/sftp.html
Putting all that together looks like
import paramiko
host = ''
port = 22
username = ''
password = ''
with paramiko.SSHClient() as client:
client.connect(host, port, username, password)
with client.open_sftp() as sftp:
files = sftp.listdir('/srv/ftp')
for i, file in enumerate(files):
if file and file.startswith('FTP'):
sftp.get(f'/srv/ftp/{file}', f'~/ftp/{file}')
print(f'Moved {file}')
This code is untested but should work. Hope that's clear.
Here is an answer in case you need a kind of find
using a SFTP connection, not knowing the exact path and name of the file. If it is not what you were looking for, I am sorry.
I made a library named sftputil, based on paramiko, which implements advanced functionalities such as glob
. To find a specific file and download it, you can do it this way :
from sftputil import SFTP
sftp = SFTP("hostname", "username", password="password")
# Here we look for a file with a name starting with `foo`
found_files = sftp.glob("directory/foo*")
# Here we look for the file `bar` in any subdirectory
found_files = sftp.glob("directory/*/bar")
# But you can use other patterns of course.
# And now the files can be downloaded
for f in found_files:
sftp.get(f, "my/local/path")
If you don’t know glob
, you should read the python documentation, as this implementation works the same way.