Filtering os.walk() dirs and files

From docs.python.org:

os.walk(top[, topdown=True[, onerror=None[, followlinks=False]]])

When topdown is True, the caller can modify the dirnames list in-place … this can be used to prune the search …

for root, dirs, files in os.walk('/home/paulo-freitas', topdown=True):
    # excludes can be done with fnmatch.filter and complementary set,
    # but it's more annoying to read.
    dirs[:] = [d for d in dirs if d not in excludes] 
    for pat in includes:
        for f in fnmatch.filter(files, pat):
            print os.path.join(root, f)

I should point out that the above code assumes excludes is a pattern, not a full path. You would need to adjust the list comprehension to filter if os.path.join(root, d) not in excludes to match the OP case.

This solution uses fnmatch.translate to convert glob patterns to regular expressions (it assumes the includes only is used for files):

import fnmatch
import os
import os.path
import re

includes = ['*.doc', '*.odt'] # for files only
excludes = ['/home/paulo-freitas/Documents'] # for dirs and files

# transform glob patterns to regular expressions
includes = r'|'.join([fnmatch.translate(x) for x in includes])
excludes = r'|'.join([fnmatch.translate(x) for x in excludes]) or r'$.'

for root, dirs, files in os.walk('/home/paulo-freitas'):

    # exclude dirs
    dirs[:] = [os.path.join(root, d) for d in dirs]
    dirs[:] = [d for d in dirs if not re.match(excludes, d)]

    # exclude/include files
    files = [os.path.join(root, f) for f in files]
    files = [f for f in files if not re.match(excludes, f)]
    files = [f for f in files if re.match(includes, f)]

    for fname in files:
        print fname