How do you get a directory listing sorted by creation date in python?

by

I’ve done this in the past for a Python script to determine the last updated files in a directory: 

import glob
import os

search_dir = "/mydir/"
# remove anything from the list that is not a file (directories, symlinks)
# thanks to J.F. Sebastion for pointing out that the requirement was a list 
# of files (presumably not including directories)  
files = list(filter(os.path.isfile, glob.glob(search_dir + "*")))
files.sort(key=lambda x: os.path.getmtime(x))

That should do what you’re looking for based on file mtime.

EDIT: Note that you can also use os.listdir() in place of glob.glob() if desired – the reason I used glob in my original code was that I was wanting to use glob to only search for files with a particular set of file extensions, which glob() was better suited to. To use listdir here’s what it would look like: 

import os

search_dir = "/mydir/"
os.chdir(search_dir)
files = filter(os.path.isfile, os.listdir(search_dir))
files = [os.path.join(search_dir, f) for f in files] # add path to each file
files.sort(key=lambda x: os.path.getmtime(x))

More Related Contents:

  1. How to find the real user home directory using python?
  2. Find the current directory and file’s directory [duplicate]
  3. How can I install pip on Windows?
  4. ‘pip’ is not recognized as an internal or external command
  5. Request UAC elevation from within a Python script?
  6. pip how to remove incorrectly installed package with a leading dash: “-pkgname”
  7. How to install both Python 2.x and Python 3.x in Windows
  8. Python not working in the command line of git bash
  9. Schedule Python Script – Windows 7
  10. Connecting to Microsoft SQL server using Python
  11. Pip – Fatal error in launcher: Unable to create process using ‘”‘
  12. Packaging a Python script on Linux into a Windows executable
  13. Detect 64bit OS (windows) in Python
  14. How to display utf-8 in windows console
  15. rpy2 install on windows 7
  16. Line reading chokes on 0x1A
  17. Can Python select what network adapter when opening a socket?
  18. UnicodeDecodeError: ‘utf-8’ codec can’t decode byte 0x96 in position 35: invalid start byte
  19. Add advanced features to a tkinter Text widget
  20. Drag and drop onto Python script in Windows Explorer
  21. Having trouble installing pycurl on windows
  22. Python subprocess.Popen as different user on Windows
  23. Determining Whether a Directory is Writeable
  24. Launch IPython notebook with selected browser
  25. Why can’t I handle a KeyboardInterrupt in python?
  26. Open File in Another Directory (Python)
  27. Sending ^C to Python subprocess objects on Windows
  28. Why does the asyncio’s event loop suppress the KeyboardInterrupt on Windows?
  29. How to calculate length of string in pixels for specific font and size?
  30. Can’t import cv2; “DLL load failed”

Leave a Comment