I’ve come across a few situations where batch processing of snapshots is necessary. Normally I manually key in the number of snaps in the for loop, but is there a better more python way? Of course there is! Enter ‘glob‘. Glob is basically a wrapper for os.listdir, which is equivalent to typing ‘ls -U’ in terminal. If you use the -U however, the ordering is completely arbitrary, so by using say:

You’re going to get an unsorted back. For some this may not be a problem, but for me? I usually need a list ordered 000-N! The solution for this comes in the form of the the python function sorted():

which returns a sorted list! The key (pun intended) here is the key keyword, which tells it which os path to sort by. Many options exist such as ‘os.path.getmtime’ to sort by timestamp, and ‘os.path.getsize’ to sort by size. Thanks to stackoverflow again for the assistance!