Move Files Or Directories in Python

In this Python tutorial, you’ll learn how to move files and folders from one location to another.

After reading this article, you’ll learn: –

• How to move single and multiple files using the shutil.move() method
• Move files that match a pattern (wildcard)
• Move an entire directory

Steps to Move a File in Python

Example: Move a Single File

Use the shutil.move() method move a file permanently from one folder to another.

shutil.move(source, destination, copy_function = copy2)

• source: The path of the source file which needs to be moved.
• destination: The path of the destination directory.
• copy_function: Moving a file is nothing but copying a file to a new location and deletes the same file from the source. This parameter is the function used for copying a file and its default value is shutil.copy2(). This could be any other function like copy() or copyfile().

In this example, we are moving the sales.txt file from the report folder to the account folder.

import shutil

# absolute path
src_path = r"E:\pynative\reports\sales.txt"
dst_path = r"E:\pynative\account\sales.txt"
shutil.move(src_path, dst_path)

Move File and Rename

Let’s assume your want to move a file, but the same file name already exists in the destination path. In such cases, you can transfer the file by renaming it.

Let’s see how to move a file and change its name.

• Store source and destination directory path into two separate variables
• Store file name into another variable
• Check if the file exists in the destination folder
• If yes, Construct a new name for a file and then pass that name to the shutil.move() method.

Suppose we want to move sales.csv into a folder called to account, and if it exists, rename it to sales_new.csv and move it.

import os
import shutil

src_folder = r"E:\pynative\reports\\"
dst_folder = r"E:\pynative\account\\"
file_name = 'sales.csv'

# check if file exist in destination
if os.path.exists(dst_folder + file_name):
    # Split name and extension
    data = os.path.splitext(file_name)
    only_name = data[0]
    extension = data[1]
    # Adding the new name
    new_base = only_name + '_new' + extension
    # construct full file path
    new_name = os.path.join(dst_folder, new_base)
    # move file
    shutil.move(src_folder + file_name, new_name)
else:
    shutil.move(src_folder + file_name, dst_folder + file_name)

Move All Files From A Directory

Sometimes we want to move all files from one directory to another. Follow the below steps to move all files from a directory.

• Get the list of all files present in the source folder using the os.listdir() function. It returns a list containing the names of the files and folders in the given directory.
• Iterate over the list using a for loop to get the individual filenames
• In each iteration, concatenate the current file name with the source folder path
• Now use the shutil.move() method to move the current file to the destination folder path.

Example: Move all files from the report folder into a account folder.

import os
import shutil

source_folder = r"E:\pynative\reports\\"
destination_folder = r"E:\pynative\account\\"

# fetch all files
for file_name in os.listdir(source_folder):
    # construct full file path
    source = source_folder + file_name
    destination = destination_folder + file_name
    # move only files
    if os.path.isfile(source):
        shutil.move(source, destination)
        print('Moved:', file_name)

Our code moved two files. Here is a list of the files in the destination directory:

• profits.txt
• revenue.txt
• expense.txt

Use the os.listdir(dst_folder) function to list all files present in the destination directory to verify the result.

Move Multiple Files

Let’s assume you want to move only a few files. In this example, we will see how to move files present in a list from a specific folder into a destination folder.

import shutil

source_folder = r"E:\pynative\reports\\"
destination_folder = r"E:\pynative\account\\"
files_to_move = ['profit.csv', 'revenue.csv']

# iterate files
for file in files_to_move:
    # construct full file path
    source = source_folder + file
    destination = destination_folder + file
    # move file
    shutil.move(source, destination)
    print('Moved:', file)

Output:

Moved: profit.csv
Moved: revenue.csv

Move Files Matching a Pattern (Wildcard)

Suppose, you want to move files if a name contains a specific string.

The Python glob module, part of the Python Standard Library, is used to find the files and folders whose names follow a specific pattern.

glob.glob(pathname, *, recursive=False)

• We can use the wildcard characters for pattern matching. The glob.glob() method returns a list of files or folders that matches the pattern specified in the pathname argument.
• Next, use the loop to move each file using the shutil.move()

Refer to this to use the different wildcards to construct different patterns.

Move files based on file extension

In this example, we will move files that have a txt extension.

import glob
import os
import shutil

src_folder = r"E:\pynative\report"
dst_folder = r"E:\pynative\account\\"

# Search files with .txt extension in source directory
pattern = "\*.txt"
files = glob.glob(src_folder + pattern)

# move the files with txt extension
for file in files:
    # extract file name form file path
    file_name = os.path.basename(file)
    shutil.move(file, dst_folder + file_name)
    print('Moved:', file)

Output:

Moved: E:\pynative\report\revenue.txt
Moved: E:\pynative\report\sales.txt

Move Files based on filename

Let’s see how to move a file whose name starts with a specific string.

import glob
import os
import shutil

src_folder = r"E:\pynative\reports"
dst_folder = r"E:\pynative\account\\"

# move file whose name starts with string 'emp'
pattern = src_folder + "\emp*"
for file in glob.iglob(pattern, recursive=True):
    # extract file name form file path
    file_name = os.path.basename(file)
    shutil.move(file, dst_folder + file_name)
    print('Moved:', file)

Output:

Moved: E:\pynative\reports\emp.txt