Copying a directory

Making copies of a directory's contents is something we can do easily, but what if I told you that a tool such as cp (the command to copy files on GNU systems) is around 1,200 lines of code?

Obviously, the cp implementation is not Python-based, it has evolved over decades, and it takes care of far more than you probably need, but still rolling your own code to copy a directory recursively takes far more than you would expect.

Luckily for us, the Python standard library provides utilities to perform the most common operations out of the box and this is one of them.

How to do it...

The steps for this recipe are as follows:

1. The copydir function can rely on shutil.copytree to do most of the work:

import shutil

def copydir(source, dest, ignore=None):
    """Copy source to dest and ignore any file matching ignore 
       pattern."""
    shutil.copytree(source, dest, ignore_dangling_symlinks=True,
                    ignore=shutil.ignore_patterns(*ignore) if 
                   ...