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Date: Sun, 22 Feb 2015 08:17:36 -0600
From: Tim Chase <python.list@tim.thechases.com>
To: Jason Friedman <jsf80238@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: What behavior would you expect?
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Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.python:86125

On 2015-02-19 22:55, Jason Friedman wrote:
> > If you're going to call listdir, you probably want to use fnmatch
> > directly.
> >
> > fnmatch seems to be silent on non-existent directories:  
> python -c 'import fnmatch; fnmatch.fnmatch("/no/such/path", "*")'

a better test would be glob.glob as fnmatch simply asks "does this
string match this pattern?" so it cares nothing for filenames.

However, it still holds that glob.glob("/does/not/exist/*.txt")
doesn't raise an error but rather just returns an empty list of
iterables.

However, for the OP's question, it's max() that raises an error:

  import glob
  import os
  def most_recent_file(loc, pattern):
    globstr = os.path.join(loc, pattern)
    return max(glob.glob(globstr), key=lambda f: os.stat(f).st_mtime)

gives me this when the glob returns an empty iterable:

  Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  ValueError: max() arg is an empty sequence

-tkc