How to use to find files recursively?

Question

There are a couple of ways:

pathlib.Path().rglob()

Use pathlib.Path().rglob() from the pathlib module, which was introduced in Python 3.5.

from pathlib import Path

for path in Path('src').rglob('*.c'):
    print(path.name)

glob.glob()

If you don’t want to use pathlib, use glob.glob():

from glob import glob

for filename in glob('src/**/*.c', recursive=True):
    print(filename)

For cases where matching files beginning with a dot (.); like files in the current directory or hidden files on Unix based system, use the os.walk() solution below.

os.walk()

For older Python versions, use os.walk() to recursively walk a directory and fnmatch.filter() to match against a simple expression:

import fnmatch
import os

matches = []
for root, dirnames, filenames in os.walk('src'):
    for filename in fnmatch.filter(filenames, '*.c'):
        matches.append(os.path.join(root, filename))

This version should also be faster depending on how many files you have, as the pathlib module has a bit of overhead over os.walk().

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