How to use glob() to find files recursively?

pathlib.Path.rglob

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

from pathlib import Path

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

If you don't want to use pathlib, use can use glob.glob('**/*.c'), but don't forget to pass in the recursive keyword parameter and it will use inordinate amount of time on large directories.

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))

Similar to other solutions, but using fnmatch.fnmatch instead of glob, since os.walk already listed the filenames:

import os, fnmatch


def find_files(directory, pattern):
    for root, dirs, files in os.walk(directory):
        for basename in files:
            if fnmatch.fnmatch(basename, pattern):
                filename = os.path.join(root, basename)
                yield filename


for filename in find_files('src', '*.c'):
    print 'Found C source:', filename

Also, using a generator alows you to process each file as it is found, instead of finding all the files and then processing them.


For python >= 3.5 you can use **, recursive=True :

import glob
for f in glob.glob('/path/**/*.c', recursive=True):
    print(f)

If recursive is True, the pattern ** will match any files and zero or more directories and subdirectories. If the pattern is followed by an os.sep, only directories and subdirectories match.


Python 3.6 Demo