Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

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                     ignore else None)

2. Then, we can easily use it to copy the contents of any directory and even limit it to only the relevant parts. We are going to copy a directory that contains three files, out of which we really only want to copy the .pdf file:

>>> import glob >>> print(glob.glob('_build/pdf/*')) ['_build/pdf/PySTLCookbook.pdf', '_build/pdf/PySTLCookbook.rtc', '_build/pdf/PySTLCookbook.stylelog'] ...