How I glob for Files in Python
==============================

A very common task for any script is to look for files on the system. My go to method when globbing for files in python is to use pathlib.

Date: March 17, 2022

A very common task for any script is to look for files on the system. My go to
method when globbing for files in python is to use pathlib.

## Setup

I setup a directory to make some examples about globbing. Here is what the
directory looks like.

``` bash
❯ tree .
.
├── content
│ ├── hello.md
│ ├── hello.py
│ ├── me.md
│ └── you.md
├── readme.md
├── README.md
├── READMES.md
└── setup.py
```

1 directory, 8 files
## Pathlib

Pathlib is a standard library module available in all LTS versions of python at
this point.

``` python
❯ from pathlib import Path
```

Creating a Path instance.

``` python
# current working directory
Path()
Path.cwd()

# The users home directory
Path.home()

# Path to a directory by string
Path('/path/to/directory')

# The users ~/.config directory
Path.home() / '.config'
```

## Globbing Examples

The path object has a glob method that allows you to glob for files with a unix
style glob pattern to search for files. Note that it gives you a generator.
This is great for many use cases, but for examples its easier to turn them to a
list to print them out.

If you need some more detail on what globbing is there is a
[wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glob_(programming)) article
discussing it. I am just showing how to glob with pathlib.

``` python

❯ Path().glob("**/*.md")

❯ list(Path().glob("**/*.md"))

[
 PosixPath('readme.md'),
 PosixPath('READMES.md'),
 PosixPath('README.md'),
 PosixPath('content/you.md'),
 PosixPath('content/me.md'),
 PosixPath('content/hello.md')
]

❯ list(Path().glob("**/*.py"))
[PosixPath('setup.py'), PosixPath('content/hello.py')]

❯ list(Path().glob("*.md"))
[PosixPath('readme.md'), PosixPath('READMES.md'), PosixPath('README.md')]

❯ list(Path().glob("*.py"))
[PosixPath('setup.py')]

❯ list(Path().glob("**/*hello*"))
[PosixPath('content/hello.py'), PosixPath('content/hello.md')]

❯ list(Path().glob("**/REA?ME.md"))
[PosixPath('README.md')]
```