Python Tutorial: How to Rename Files and Move Files with Python

Key Takeaways

hello and welcome back to my python tutorials in the last tutorial we were talking about how to delete files and directories uh in this tutorial I'm going to be showing you guys how to do something a little less destructive and this time we're just going to be renaming and moving files about and actually this process is the same for whether you want to rename or move a file so anyway let's go ahead and get right on into it I've made an example oh I have not made an example file so I'm going to go ahead and make an example text file and I'm just going to call it rename me and then we're also going to or rename me we're also going to uh just create a sample folder um for when we go to move the files so now how do we do this so we're going to look at rename me and we're going to need um import OS and and this is a oneliner as well that we could just throw in here though since we have two variables um it's good to go maybe Define them beforehand but you don't have to so for example we could just say os. rename this is the renaming function and in here you have two variables you have a previous name and a new name and this is kind of why I think that sometimes it's helpful to use variables because you might get these two things flipped um so so because your previous name and your new name is highly likely to be somewhat similar so it's it's helpful to have um uh variables to Define this so I'm going to go ahead and Define some variables and that's going to be equal the first variable is going to be Ren name me.txt that's our first file now the new file so the new name is going to be equal to we'll just say it named. text just so we can see it and then here we'll just put pre name and new name we'll save that and let me just push this down a little bit so when we go to run and sure enough you can see it's the file's now been renamed to name and nothing is really spit out so the next thing is okay well what if we want to move the file you said it's the same thing well it is the same thing so you could say the previous name is name. text the new name is sample folder sln name. text so now we'll save that let's run that and you see you know everything's the same here and then in Sample folder we look in here and oh there's named and you could you could have moved it and named it anything else uh that you wanted so the next question U before I let you all go is what if we take that's the previous name and what if we rename this to uh di CS B and we run that sure enough you can see the file name has even been changed as well so I mean you can change everything about the file now um so in previous tutorials I've showed you guys how to append files write files read from files now you know how to delete files directories rename directories rename files and move files and then you can use this as well to move directories so hopefully uh that's been pretty helpful for you guys uh hopefully you enjoyed as always thanks for watching and stay tuned to more videos