Just Some Techie Notes!

In many cases, data accumulates over time, and a lot of this data is not being accessed at all, sometimes for years. Accordingly, it would be great if you could create a report that shows which data, the last access date, its size and its owner.

With a few lines of Python, you can very efficiently traverse (I named it traverse.py) any mounted filesystem and save to a CSV file that has the following set of data:

• Filename (with absolute path)
• Last Access Date & Time
• File Size (in bytes)
• UID or username of the owner

import os, sys, time
import pathlib #pathlib only needed if fileowner will be a string not UID

for root, directories, filenames in os.walk(sys.argv[1]): #Loop through the filesystem or folder passed as an argument
    for filename in filenames:
        try:
            fullpath = os.path.join(root, filename) #Get full path of the file
            timelastaccessed = time.ctime(os.stat(fullpath).st_atime) #Get last access time
            filesize = os.stat(fullpath).st_size #Get file size
            fileowner = os.stat(fullpath).st_uid #Get file owner as a UID
            #fileowner = pathlib.Path(fullpath).owner() #Get file owner as a string, much slower
            print(fullpath, ",", timelastaccessed, ",", filesize, ",", fileowner, sep='')  #Format to output in CSV
        except OSError:
            print("Path does not exist or is inaccessible") #In case the file was inaccessible
        except UnicodeEncodeError:
            print("Encoding Error") #In case of files with names that throw a UnicodeEncodeError exception

To execute, just run:

python3 traverse.py filesystem_or_folder >> output.csv

The above outputs the UID, but if you want to output the username itself, just comment the fileowner = os.stat(xxxxx) and uncomment the next line that uses pathlib

You can then import that CSV file into any available analytics platform like PowerBI and do your magic!

That’s it! Enjoy!