How can I create a nested directory

Question

How to check if the directory a file is going to be written to exists, and if not, create the directory using Python?

Here is what I tried:

import os

file_path = "/my/directory/filename.txt"
directory = os.path.dirname(file_path)

try:
    os.stat(directory)
except:
    os.mkdir(directory)       

f = file(filename)

Somehow, I missed os.path.exists (thanks kanja, Blair, and Douglas). This is what I have now:

def ensure_dir(file_path):
    directory = os.path.dirname(file_path)
    if not os.path.exists(directory):
        os.makedirs(directory)

Is there a flag for "open", that makes this happen automatically?

Answer 1

Hello,

Using try except and the right error code from errno module gets rid of the race condition and is cross-platform:

import os
import errno

def make_sure_path_exists(path):
    try:
        os.makedirs(path)
    except OSError as exception:
        if exception.errno != errno.EEXIST:
            raise

In other words, we try to create the directories, but if they already exist we ignore the error. On the other hand, any other error gets reported. For example, if you create dir 'a' beforehand and remove all permissions from it, you will get an OSError raised with errno.EACCES