Renaming Files and/or Directory

Question

I'm quite new to Python and would love to gather feedback on my code. I've written a piece a script that allows me to search all file or directory names within a folder matching a particular pattern. The caller can specify if the function should be recursive or not.

It's only a basic script I would love to know how it could be improved!

import sys
import os
import string
def rename(source, pattern, replacement, dirs = False, recurse = False):
 """
 Rename a file or directory
 source = source directory
 pattern = old string
 replacement = new string
 dirs = apply to directorys
 recurse = move recursivley
 """
 dir = os.path.abspath(source)
 for item in os.listdir(dir):
 # Get the full path
 item = os.path.join(source, item)
 if os.path.isfile(item) and pattern in item:
 os.rename(item, string.replace(item, pattern, replacement))
 elif os.path.isdir(item):
 if recurse:
 # Move to the next level, before renaming
 rename_items(item, pattern, replacement, dirs, recurse)
 if pattern in item and dirs:
 os.rename(item, string.replace(item, pattern, replacement))
if __name__ == '__main__':
 source = sys.argv[1]
 pattern = sys.argv[2]
 replacement = sys.argv[3]
 rename(source, pattern, replacement, True, True)

• rahmu: The only problem I found with your script is that you shouldn't name your variable dir as it is the name of a global function.

Answer 1

What if the script renames file "a.zip" to "b.zip", and both files "a.zip" and "b.zip" exist in the same directory?