Check if Directory exists in Python

Python – Check if directory exists

To check if a directory exists in Python, you can use the os.path library. Import os library, call the os.path.exists() function and pass the path to directory as argument to the function.

The syntax to call os.path.exists() function to check if a directory exists

import os

os.path.exists('path/to/directory')

The function exists() returns a boolean value of True if the directory exists, or False if the directory does not exist.

Example

In the following program, we check programmatically if the directory myfolder/resources exists or not using os.path.exists() function.

Directory

We use the function call os.path.exists() as a condition in the if-else statement.

import os

path_to_directory = 'myfolder/resources'

if os.path.exists(path_to_directory):
    print("Directory exists.")
else:
    print("Directory does not exist.")

Output

Directory exists.

Summary

In this tutorial of Python Examples, we learned how to check if a directory exists or not using os.path.exists() function, with the help of examples.