How to use glob() to find files recursively?

There are a couple of ways:

pathlib.Path().rglob()

Use pathlib.Path().rglob() from the pathlib module, which was introduced in Python 3.5.

from pathlib import Path

for path in Path('src').rglob('*.c'):
    print(path.name)

glob.glob()

If you don't want to use pathlib, use glob.glob():

from glob import glob

for filename in glob('src/**/*.c', recursive=True):
    print(filename)   

For cases where matching files beginning with a dot (.); like files in the current directory or hidden files on Unix based system, use the os.walk() solution below.

os.walk()

For older Python versions, use os.walk() to recursively walk a directory and fnmatch.filter() to match against a simple expression:

import fnmatch
import os

matches = []
for root, dirnames, filenames in os.walk('src'):
    for filename in fnmatch.filter(filenames, '*.c'):
        matches.append(os.path.join(root, filename))

This version should also be faster depending on how many files you have, as the pathlib module has a bit of overhead over os.walk().

Similar to other solutions, but using fnmatch.fnmatch instead of glob, since os.walk already listed the filenames:

import os, fnmatch


def find_files(directory, pattern):
    for root, dirs, files in os.walk(directory):
        for basename in files:
            if fnmatch.fnmatch(basename, pattern):
                filename = os.path.join(root, basename)
                yield filename


for filename in find_files('src', '*.c'):
    print 'Found C source:', filename

Also, using a generator alows you to process each file as it is found, instead of finding all the files and then processing them.

I've modified the glob module to support ** for recursive globbing, e.g:

>>> import glob2
>>> all_header_files = glob2.glob('src/**/*.c')

https://github.com/miracle2k/python-glob2/

Useful when you want to provide your users with the ability to use the ** syntax, and thus os.walk() alone is not good enough.

Starting with Python 3.4, one can use the glob() method of one of the Path classes in the new pathlib module, which supports ** wildcards. For example:

from pathlib import Path

for file_path in Path('src').glob('**/*.c'):
    print(file_path) # do whatever you need with these files

Update: Starting with Python 3.5, the same syntax is also supported by glob.glob().