How to read files in bulk with python for Network Engineers

• Printing all files inside a particular directory.
  • We are going to leverage python’s os module.
  • Import the in-built os module and call the listdir method.
  • listdir method takes argument of the path of the directory relative to where you have placed your script file that you want to scan for files inside it.

import os

for file in os.listdir('input'):
    print(file)

╰─ python3 script1.py                                                                                                                                                                      ─╯
rtr-012-ce01.txt
rtr-012-ce02.txt
rtr-039-ce02.txt
rtr-039-ce01.txt
rtr-017-ce01.txt

2. Opening all files and reading content inside the directory.

• For each file in input directory
• open the file in read-only mode and create a file handler object as f
• read data from file handler object into a variable called data
• print the data

import os

for file in os.listdir('input'):
    with open('input/' + file, 'r') as f:
        data = f.read()
        print(data)

3. Once you have retried the contents of the file into any variable, data in this case. We can write the script further to extract what we need exactly from the data.

• Extract details like
  • Hostname
  • Hardware
  • Version
  • anything else that you want to extract

This is the bird’s eye introduction on how to read files in bulk with python. The next post in series is going to talk about how to process the data we have read into meaningful information.