Python program to change the current working directory

Python program to change the current working directory:

In this post, we will learn how to change the current working directory in Python. The current working directory is the directory where currently the program is pointing to.

Python provides os module to work with different operating system-related operations. This is an inbuilt module of Python. The os module provides a method that can be used to change the current working directory to any other directory.

`os.chdir`:

The os.chdir method is used to change the current working directory.

It is defined as below:

os.chdir(path)

It takes one path as the parameter. It will change the current working directory to this new path. It doesn’t return anything.

Python example program:

The below program shows how we can change the current working directory with os.chdir:

import os

new_directory = '/Users/cvc/'

print('Current working directory: {}'.format(os.getcwd()))

if os.path.exists(new_directory):
    os.chdir(new_directory)
    print('Changed to directory: {}'.format(os.getcwd()))
else:
    print('Invalid path')

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Here,

new_directory is the new directory where we want to switch.
By using the os.getcwd() method, we are printing the current working directory.
The if block checks if the new_directory actually exists or not. If it exists, it changes the current working directory to new_directory. Else, it prints one message that the path is invalid

If you run this program, it will print output as below :

Current working directory: /Users/cvc/Dropbox
Changed to directory: /Users/cvc

Exceptions:

If we provide one invalid directory path to the chdir method, it will throw one FileNotFoundError exception.

FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory:

We can wrap it in a try-except block to handle this.

try:
    os.chdir(new_directory)
except FileNotFoundError:
    print('Error on changing directory')

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Python program to change the current working directory