I have a set of folders, and I want to be able to run a function that will find the most recently edited file and tell me the name of the file and the folder it is in.
Folder layout:
root
Folder A
File A
File B
Folder B
File C
File D
etc...
Any tips to get me started as i've hit a bit of a wall.
You should look at the os.walk function, as well as os.stat, which can let you do something like:
import os
max_mtime = 0
for dirname,subdirs,files in os.walk("."):
for fname in files:
full_path = os.path.join(dirname, fname)
mtime = os.stat(full_path).st_mtime
if mtime > max_mtime:
max_mtime = mtime
max_dir = dirname
max_file = fname
print(max_dir, max_file)
os.path.getmtime() is a convenient shorthand for os.stat(full_path).st_mtime
os.walk returned its file name, but before the call to os.stat then you would expect to see such an error. If you actually needed to run such a script on directories which have files being deleted in such a manner, I would recommend wrapping the call to os.stat in a try/except block.
It helps to wrap the built in directory walking to function that yields only full paths to files. Then you can just take the function that returns all files and pick out the one that has the highest modification time:
import os
def all_files_under(path):
"""Iterates through all files that are under the given path."""
for cur_path, dirnames, filenames in os.walk(path):
for filename in filenames:
yield os.path.join(cur_path, filename)
latest_file = max(all_files_under('root'), key=os.path.getmtime)
If anyone is looking for an one line way to do it:
latest_edited_file = max([f for f in os.scandir("path\\to\\search")], key=lambda x: x.stat().st_mtime).name
For multiple files, if anyone came here for that:
import glob, os
files = glob.glob("/target/directory/path/*/*.mp4")
files.sort(key=os.path.getmtime)
for file in files:
print(file)
This will print all files in any folder within /path/ that have the .mp4 extension, with the most recently modified file paths at the bottom.
Use os.path.walk() to traverse the directory tree and os.stat().st_mtime to get the mtime of the files.
The function you pass to os.path.walk() (the visit parameter) just needs to keep track of the largest mtime it's seen and where it saw it.
I'm using path = r"C:\Users\traveler\Desktop":
import os
def all_files_under(path):
#"""Iterates through all files that are under the given path."""
for cur_path, dirnames, filenames in os.walk(path):
for filename in filenames:
yield os.path.join(cur_path, filename)
latest_file = max(all_files_under('root'), key=os.path.getmtime)
What am i missing here?
