Getting Started

PyFilesystem is a Python-only module and can be installed with easy_install or from source. PyFilesystem is known to work on Linux, Mac and OSX.

Installing

The easiest way to install PyFilesystem is with easy_install:

easy_install fs

Add the -U switch if you want to upgrade a previous installation:

easy_install -U fs

If you prefer to use Pip (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pip) to install Python packages, the procedure is much the same:

pip install fs

Or to upgrade:

pip install fs --upgrade

You can also install the cutting edge release by checking out the source via SVN:

svn checkout http://pyfilesystem.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ pyfilesystem-read-only
cd pyfilesystem-read-only
python setup.py install

Whichever method you use, you should now have the fs module on your path (version number may vary):

>>> import fs
>>> fs.__version__
'0.4.0'

Prerequisites

PyFilesystem requires at least Python 2.5. There are a few other dependencies if you want to use some of the more advanced filesystem interfaces, but for basic use all that is needed is the Python standard library.

Quick Examples

Before you dive in to the API documentation, here are a few interesting things you can do with PyFilesystem.

The following will list all the files in your home directory:

>>> from fs.osfs import OSFS
>>> home_fs = OSFS('~/') # 'c:\Users\<login name>' on Windows
>>> home_fs.listdir()

Here’s how to browse your home folder with a graphical interface:

>>> home_fs.browse()

This will display the total number of bytes store in ‘.py’ files your home directory:

>>> sum(home_fs.getsize(f) for f in home_fs.walkfiles(wildcard='*.py'))