Python list all files in directory and subdirectories

Getting a list of all files in a directory and its subdirectories can be quite a common task, so, in this tutorial I will show you how you can do this with 4 lines of code using os.walk.

Below you can see how we can recursively loop through all the files in a given directory:

import os

for path, currentDirectory, files in os.walk("/Users/darren/Desktop/test"):
    for file in files:
        print(os.path.join(path, file))

In the above code I join the path and the file to give me the full path to each file that exists within the directory that I provided.

When I run the above code I have the following output:

/Users/darren/Desktop/test/.DS_Store
/Users/darren/Desktop/test/file 1.rtf
/Users/darren/Desktop/test/test 1 level/.DS_Store
/Users/darren/Desktop/test/test 1 level/file 2.rtf

There are a few other ways to do this, but I prefer to use os.walk because of how simple it is to use.