Notes

shutil.copytree() has an optional ignore argument that takes a callable object. This callable will receive each directory path and a list of the directory’s contents, and returns a list of names that will be ignored, not copied.

The shutil module also provides an ignore_patterns() function for use with this new parameter. ignore_patterns() takes an arbitrary number of glob-style patterns and returns a callable that will ignore any files and directories that match any of these patterns. The following example copies a directory tree, but skips both .svn directories and Emacs backup files, which have names ending with ‘~’:

shutil.copytree('Doc/library', '/tmp/library',
                ignore=shutil.ignore_patterns('*~', '.svn'))