Getting a list of all subdirectories in the current directory

Question

Is there a way to return a list of all the subdirectories in the current directory in Python?

I know you can do this with files, but I need to get the list of direct

Answer 1

Python 3.4 introduced the pathlib module into the standard library, which provides an object oriented approach to handle filesystem paths:

from pathlib import Path

p = Path('./')

# All subdirectories in the current directory, not recursive.
[f for f in p.iterdir() if f.is_dir()]

To recursively list all subdirectories, path globbing can be used with the ** pattern.

# This will also include the current directory '.'
list(p.glob('**'))

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Note that a single * as the glob pattern would include both files and directories non-recursively. To get only directories, a trailing / can be appended but this only works when using the glob library directly, not when using glob via pathlib:

import glob

# These three lines return both files and directories
list(p.glob('*'))
list(p.glob('*/'))
glob.glob('*')

# Whereas this returns only directories
glob.glob('*/')

So Path('./').glob('**') matches the same paths as glob.glob('**/', recursive=True).

Pathlib is also available on Python 2.7 via the pathlib2 module on PyPi.