Book Image

Python Automation Cookbook

By : Jaime Buelta
Book Image

Python Automation Cookbook

By: Jaime Buelta

Overview of this book

Have you been doing the same old monotonous office work over and over again? Or have you been trying to find an easy way to make your life better by automating some of your repetitive tasks? Through a tried and tested approach, understand how to automate all the boring stuff using Python. The Python Automation Cookbook helps you develop a clear understanding of how to automate your business processes using Python, including detecting opportunities by scraping the web, analyzing information to generate automatic spreadsheets reports with graphs, and communicating with automatically generated emails. You’ll learn how to get notifications via text messages and run tasks while your mind is focused on other important activities, followed by understanding how to scan documents such as résumés. Once you’ve gotten familiar with the fundamentals, you’ll be introduced to the world of graphs, along with studying how to produce organized charts using Matplotlib. In addition to this, you’ll gain in-depth knowledge of how to generate rich graphics showing relevant information. By the end of this book, you’ll have refined your skills by attaining a sound understanding of how to identify and correct problems to produce superior and reliable systems.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Crawling and searching directories

In this recipe, we'll learn how to recursively scan a directory to get all the files contained there. The files can be of a particular kind, or just all of them.

Getting ready

Let's start by creating a test directory with some file information:

$ mkdir dir
$ touch dir/file1.txt
$ touch dir/file2.txt
$ mkdir dir/subdir
$ touch dir/subdir/file3.txt
$ touch dir/subdir/file4.txt
$ touch dir/subdir/file5.pdf
$ touch dir/file6.pdf

All the files will be empty; we will use them in this recipe only to discover them. Notice there are four files that have a .txt extension, and two that have a .pdf extension.

The files are also available in the GitHub repository here: https://github.com/PacktPublishing...