Hey r/programming 👋

I hacked together a tiny helper called findpath whose entire pitch is: you only need to remember the name of the file. Point it at a logical “root”, tell it the filename, and it’ll walk everything under that root and return the single absolute path that matches—otherwise it raises clear, typed exceptions (file not found / more than one match / root not set, etc.).

• PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/findpath/
• GitHub: https://github.com/joshikarthikey/findpath

Why bother?

• 🔎 Zero mental overhead – stop remembering long nested directories; remember just settings.yaml.
• 🧯 Clear failure modes – you’ll know if the file doesn’t exist or exists more than once.
• 🧰 No third‑party deps – pure stdlib (os).
• 🧪 Easy to unit test – deterministic, small surface area.
• 🧱 Works anywhere – POSIX/Windows (relies on os, not shell tricks).

Attributes (all exposed as properties with sanity checks)

• root: (required) folder name that marks the boundary you’ll search under (e.g., "my_project").
• root_path: absolute path of that root folder once discovered.
• all_paths: list of every file path under root_path found during the scan.
• file: the file name you’re currently searching for.
• your_path: the final resolved absolute path to the single matching file.
• current_dir: the working directory when the object is created (captured via os.getcwd()).

Methods

• find(desired_file: str) -> str Main entrypoint. Walks up from current_dir until it hits root, then recursively scans down. Returns the absolute path if there’s exactly one match, else raises.
• find_all_paths(root_path: str) -> list[str] Recursively collects all file paths below root_path. Used internally by find, but you can call it yourself if you want the raw list.

Looking for collaborators

I’m still pretty new to Python packaging and open-source contributions, so this project is as much a learning experienceas it is a useful tool. If you’re an experienced Python dev, I’d love your feedback or help making this more “production-ready.”

Things I’d especially appreciate help with:

• Making the code more Pythonic (e.g., better use of pathlib).
• Adding tests and CI workflows.
• Improving error handling with custom exceptions.
• Documentation improvements (I’m still figuring out best practices).
• Designing a simple CLI tool.