Traversing through each directory to identify file types and the count of each type?

Question

I am trying to build a script that can help me in traversing through all the files in a directory and to identify its file type. At the end the result should print the total count of each file type that were identified. I am using the magic library to identify the file type based on MIME.

for filename in os.listdir(os.getcwd()):
    print filename
    with magic.Magic(flags=magic.MAGIC_MIME_TYPE) as m:
        t = m.id_filename(filename)
        print t

The identification piece is pasted above which seems to be working fine but I am not sure how to store the identified filetypes and their count. The output should look like: filetype1 count filetype2 count ... ...

Please guide me as to what should be the ideal way of doing it.

throw all your filenames into a list new_list, and from collections import Counter to Counter(new_list) — ryugie
– ryugie, Commented Mar 13, 2017 at 17:56

nir0s · Accepted Answer · 2017-03-13 18:09:17Z

1

You can create a dictionary containing a mapping of each file type to its count. e.g.

file_types = {'filetype1' : 10, 'filetype2': 20, ...}

Note that your current solution will only work on the current directory and not subdirectories.

file_types = {}

for filename in os.listdir(os.getcwd()):
    with magic.Magic(flags=magic.MAGIC_MIME_TYPE) as m:
        t = m.id_filename(filename)
        file_types.setdefault(t, 0)
        file_types[t] += 1
...

Should append and count for you.

edited Mar 13, 2017 at 18:09

answered Mar 13, 2017 at 17:59

nir0s

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Schmuddi · Accepted Answer · 2017-03-13 18:00:59Z

You could use the Counter class from the collections module. It is basically a variant of a dictionary, with a few additional methods and the advantage that you don't need to initialize it with 0 when counting.

I don't have that magic that you mention, so here's an example using my_magic as a substitute:

import collections
import os

def my_magic(filename):
    """
    This function is just a placeholder to be used in place of your id_filename()
    method.
    """
    if filename.endswith(".txt"): 
        return "TXT"
    elif filename.endswith(".pdf"):
        return "PDF"
    else:
        return "other"

# initialize the counter object:
counter = collections.Counter()

for filename in os.listdir(os.getcwd()):
    print filename

    # substitute the next line with whatever you use to determine the 
    # type of the file:
    t = my_magic(filename)
    print t

    # increase the count for the current value of 't':
    counter[t] += 1

# output what is in counter:
for ext, n in counter.items():
    print ext, n

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