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Dennis O'Keeffe
Dennis O'Keeffe

Posted on • Originally published at blog.dennisokeeffe.com

Tip: Making Directories Recursively With Python

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This is Day 8 of the #100DaysOfPython challenge.

Today's post is a quick overview of making directories recursively (if they do not exist).

Getting started

Let's create the hello-recursive-dirs directory and install Pillow.

# Make the `hello-recursive-dirs` directory
$ mkdir hello-recursive-dirs
$ cd hello-recursive-dirs
# Create a file for our script
$ touch main.py
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Using the OS module to create folders recursively

The OS library has a function makedirs that can be used to make directories recursively.

In this example, let's create the folder tmp/deep/folder.

Add the following code to main.py:

import os

new_folder_name = 'tmp/deep/folder'
if not os.path.exists(new_folder_name):
    os.makedirs(new_folder_name)
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Run the script with python main.py and confirm that the folder was created.

Resources and further reading

  1. OS.makedirs

Photo credit: pawel_czerwinski

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