I’ve begun working on a new project, POOF (Project Orphaned Object Finder). It searches through a directory and all sub-directories to detect files that are not referenced by any other files, or not referenced by a file you target or any of that file’s targets etc. Basically, looking for unused or orphaned resources in a project of any language (but JS/HTML/CSS to start).

Tonight I worked on getting the directories listing recursively.

I’m sure there’s some sort of built-in function or UNIX function I could call or something like that, but half of my goal with this project is learning Python, so, yeah. I wanted to do this one by hand.

General overview of my approach:

I made a function “listDirectories” which you pass three arguments to; directory, tabStops, path.

The directory is the directory you want to go to.
The tabStops is how many tabStops you want to display before the directory listing.
The path is the path you are coming from.

The function calls itself each time it encounters a subdirectory. You start the whole thing off with a hard-coded seed. The next step is to un-hard-code this seed so you can pass the seed values in from the command line, or just call the program from your current directory (which is how you will kick off the whole thing when this project is complete). Something like:

POOF.py -d=directory
or
POOF.py
or
POOF.py -d=directory -t=\t\t -p=C:\Projects\POOF

This will of course need to be ironed out because that third one looks UGLY.

Here’s the current iteration of the code. Keep in mind this is my first real Python program: