Merging multiple CSV files without headers being repeated (using Python)

While I think that the best answer is the one from @valentin, you can do this without using csv module at all:

import glob

interesting_files = glob.glob("*.csv") 

header_saved = False
with open('output.csv','wb') as fout:
    for filename in interesting_files:
        with open(filename) as fin:
            header = next(fin)
            if not header_saved:
                fout.write(header)
                header_saved = True
            for line in fin:
                fout.write(line)

If you are on a linux system:

head -1 director/one_file.csv > output csv   ## writing the header to the final file
tail -n +2  director/*.csv >> output.csv  ## writing the content of all csv starting with second line into final file

If you dont mind the overhead, you could use pandas which is shipped with common python distributions. If you plan do more with speadsheet tables, I recommend using pandas rather than trying to write your own libraries.

import pandas as pd
import glob
interesting_files = glob.glob("*.csv")
df_list = []
for filename in sorted(interesting_files):
    df_list.append(pd.read_csv(filename))
full_df = pd.concat(df_list)

full_df.to_csv('output.csv')

Just a little more on pandas. Because it is made to deal with spreadsheet like data, it knows the first line is a header. When reading a CSV it separates the data table from the header which is kept as metadata of the dataframe, the standard datatype in pandas. If you concat several of these dataframes it concatenates only the dataparts if their headers are the same. If the headers are not the same it fails and gives you an error. Probably a good thing in case your directory is polluted with CSV files from another source.

Another thing: I just added sorted() around the interesting_files. I assume your files are named in order and this order should be kept. I am not sure about glob, but the os functions are not necessarily returning files sorted by their name.