ing. Modifying dirnames when topdown is false has no effect on the behavior of os.walk(), since the directories in dirnames have already been generated by the time dirnames itself is generated. No matter the value of topdown, the list of subdirectories is retrieved before the tuples for the directory and its subdirectories are generated. By default errors from the os.scandir() call are ignored. If optional arg 'onerror' is specified, it should be a function; it will be called with one argument, an OSError instance. It can report the error to continue with the walk, or raise the exception to abort the walk. Note that the filename is available as the filename attribute of the exception object. By default, os.walk does not follow symbolic links to subdirectories on systems that support them. In order to get this functionality, set the optional argument 'followlinks' to true. Caution: if you pass a relative pathname for top, don't change the current working directory between resumptions of walk. walk never changes the current directory, and assumes that the client doesn't either. Example: import os from os.path import join, getsize for root, dirs, files in os.walk('python/Lib/email'): print(root, "consumes", end="") print(sum(getsize(join(root, name)) for name in files), end="") print("bytes in", len(files), "non-directory files") if 'CVS' in dirs: dirs.remove('CVS') # don't visit CVS directories z