Following command is used to Copy File Following command is used to Copy File with MetaData Information
How to Copy a File in Python
Here are the steps to copy file in Python using the shutil copy() method: Step 1) Capture the original path in the current directory Before, we copy a file, we need to get the the path to the original file in the current directory. In the code –
Declaring variable Applying split function on variable
Code Explanation
First we are going to check that our “guru99.txt” file exists or not. Since we have created guru99.txt file earlier, we know it exists, and we will carry on further with the code We store the file path in the variable “src” if your file exist Once we get the path, we going to separate the path and the file name For that, we are going to use the split path.split function on source variable Code when executed prints out “file name” and “file path” separately
Step 2) Create a copy of our existing file using shutil module We use Shutil Module to create a copy of the existing file. Here we used to create a copy of our existing file “guru99.txt.”
Code Explanation
Take the original file name “guru99.txt” and add letters .bak at the end “guru99.txt.bak”. This name with .bak extension is going to be our duplicate copy And then we going to use utility’s copy function to copy from source to the destination When you run the code, you will see a duplicate file with .bak extension is created on right-hand side of the panel
Step 3) Copy meta-data associated with the file, file permission and other information Copy function only copies the content of the file but no other information. To copy meta-data associated with the file, file permission and other information you have to use “copystat” function. Before we run this code, we have to delete our copy file “guru99.text.bak”.
Once you deleted the file and run the program it will create a copy of your .txt file but this time with all the information like file permission, modification time and meta-data information. You can go to your O.S shell to verify the information.
Here is the code Step 4) Fetch the information You can fetch the information about the text file last modified
Code Line#15- It tells the day, date, month, year and time when .txt file (guru99) was last modified. We use the path module to get the file modification time details, and then we are going to use the time classes c time function to convert that into a readable time. So when we run the code, we can see the file guru99.txt was last modified on Mon, Jan 8th at 13:35 2018.
Code Line#17- It does the same thing giving information about file modification, but it has a different format to represent it. Here we use Get Modification Time function (path.getmtime(“guru99.txt”)). Now instead of using the c time function we going to use From Time Stamp function and going to construct a date time object. In output, you can see file modification time detail is printed out in different format 2018-01-08, 13:35:51.334072
Here is the code
Summary
To create a copy of the existing file by use code shutil.copy (src,dst) To copy all the information of original file to duplicate file like file permission, modification time or meta-data information by use code shutil.copystat(src,dst)
