How can a file be copied?
shutil
has many methods you can use. One of which is:
from shutil import copyfile
copyfile(src, dst)
- Copy the contents of the file named
src
to a file nameddst
. - The destination location must be writable; otherwise, an
IOError
exception will be raised. - If
dst
already exists, it will be replaced. - Special files such as character or block devices and pipes cannot be copied with this function.
- With
copy
,src
anddst
are path names given asstr
s.
Another shutil
method to look at is shutil.copy2()
. It's similar but preserves more metadata (e.g. time stamps).
If you use os.path
operations, use copy
rather than copyfile
. copyfile
will only accept strings.
Function | Copies metadata |
Copies permissions |
Uses file object | Destination may be directory |
---|---|---|---|---|
shutil.copy | No | Yes | No | Yes |
shutil.copyfile | No | No | No | No |
shutil.copy2 | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
shutil.copyfileobj | No | No | Yes | No |
copy2(src,dst)
is often more useful than copyfile(src,dst)
because:
- it allows
dst
to be a directory (instead of the complete target filename), in which case the basename ofsrc
is used for creating the new file; - it preserves the original modification and access info (mtime and atime) in the file metadata (however, this comes with a slight overhead).
Here is a short example:
import shutil
shutil.copy2('/src/dir/file.ext', '/dst/dir/newname.ext') # complete target filename given
shutil.copy2('/src/file.ext', '/dst/dir') # target filename is /dst/dir/file.ext