Now you’re ready to use Python for file system operations! This is a huge step up. Working with files allows you to hold onto your data after a program terminates, load your data more quickly and conveniently, and move your data from one computer to another.

In this video course, you’ve learned how to:

Create files and directories
Iterate over the contents of a directory
Search for files and folders using wildcards
Move and delete files and folders

For more information on the topics in this course, check out:

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Sample Code (.zip)

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Course Slides (.pdf)

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Congratulations, you made it to the end of the course! What’s your #1 takeaway or favorite thing you learned? How are you going to put your newfound skills to use? Leave a comment in the discussion section and let us know.

00:00 This lesson is a summary and includes additional resources for you to continue your learning. In the course, you learned how to use Python’s pathlib module to create files and directories, iterate over the contents of a directory, search for files and folders using wildcards, and also to move and delete files and folders—a whole bunch of file system operations done with Python

00:24 Along the way, you also learned about what files are, what the file system is, how there’s differences between Windows and Unix systems. You learned about absolute and relative paths, about glob patterns, about recursive matching, and also about the shutil module.

00:42 Here are some additional resources for you to continue your learning. If you want to learn more about Python 3’s pathlib module, then you can check out the resources we have on Real Python.

00:52 There’s a written tutorial as well as a video course. And if you want to get more practical working with files in Python, then you can check out Working With Files in Python. Also, here we have a video course as well as a written resource. And of course, there’s the rest of this Python Basics learning path. And in the next course, you will also get more practical working with files.

01:15 Congratulations for making it all the way through this course. Thanks for joining, and hope to see you around Real Python.

Ray Osborn on Dec. 20, 2022

Very clear course. I am a little confused about shutil compatibility with path-like objects in older Python versions. It looks as if path-like objects could only be used as shutil arguments in v3.8, but the Python documentation seems to imply that the move function was only updated in 3.9. I guess that doesn’t affect this course, because we would use the pathlib replace function, but unfortunately many shared Python distributions still run 3.7.

akazimierz on Jan. 5, 2023

Thanks for the course, Martin – I’m glad I learned new things.

Some time ago I wrote utility functions for IDLE, so I could move through directories as within the terminal – now perhaps I could refactor some code, or add new functions. IDLE ls() example

Martin Breuss RP Team on Jan. 5, 2023

@akazimierz that looks like a useful utility function. Do you have these somewhere on a GitHub repo and do you want to share them?

writetomdw on Jan. 25, 2023

nicely constructed course for beginners although it has references to generators and tuples so good to leave some supporting materials or links to read for absolute beginners to fit the title of this course. Overall it is a good course to clear the basic concepts of file system.

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Python Basics: File System Operations (Summary)