Copy using the Windows copy dialog

Question

I\'m currently using shutil.copy2() to copy a large number of image files and folders (anywhere between 0.5 and 5 gigs). Shutil works fine, but it\'s

Answer 1

If your goal is a fancy copy dialog, SHFileOperation Windows API function provides that. pywin32 package has a python binding for it, ctypes is also an option (google "SHFileOperation ctypes" for examples).

Here is my (very lightly tested) example using pywin32:

import os.path
from win32com.shell import shell, shellcon


def win32_shellcopy(src, dest):
    """
    Copy files and directories using Windows shell.

    :param src: Path or a list of paths to copy. Filename portion of a path
                (but not directory portion) can contain wildcards ``*`` and
                ``?``.
    :param dst: destination directory.
    :returns: ``True`` if the operation completed successfully,
              ``False`` if it was aborted by user (completed partially).
    :raises: ``WindowsError`` if anything went wrong. Typically, when source
             file was not found.

    .. seealso:
        `SHFileperation on MSDN `
    """
    if isinstance(src, basestring):  # in Py3 replace basestring with str
        src = os.path.abspath(src)
    else:  # iterable
        src = '\0'.join(os.path.abspath(path) for path in src)

    result, aborted = shell.SHFileOperation((
        0,
        shellcon.FO_COPY,
        src,
        os.path.abspath(dest),
        shellcon.FOF_NOCONFIRMMKDIR,  # flags
        None,
        None))

    if not aborted and result != 0:
        # Note: raising a WindowsError with correct error code is quite
        # difficult due to SHFileOperation historical idiosyncrasies.
        # Therefore we simply pass a message.
        raise WindowsError('SHFileOperation failed: 0x%08x' % result)

    return not aborted

You can also perform the same copy operation in "silent mode" (no dialog, no confirmationsm, no error popups) if you set the flags above to shellcon.FOF_SILENT | shellcon.FOF_NOCONFIRMATION | shellcon.FOF_NOERRORUI | shellcon.FOF_NOCONFIRMMKDIR. See SHFILEOPSTRUCT for details.