Colab how to get file id for existing file

Question

I am starting with colab for ml and I have problem importing files from my google drive into the notebook. Say I got a file pretrained_vgg19.mat in my drive like drive/jupyter/pretrained_vgg19.mat. The code snippet for importing files from drive says that I need to use the file_ID that looks like laggVyWshwcyP6kEI-y_W3P8D26sz. How do I get this file_ID?

Answer 1

See PyDrive documentation for the ListFile command:

from pydrive.drive import GoogleDrive

drive = GoogleDrive(gauth) # Create GoogleDrive instance with authenticated GoogleAuth instance

# Auto-iterate through all files in the root folder.
file_list = drive.ListFile({'q': "'root' in parents and trashed=false"}).GetList()
for file1 in file_list:
  print('title: %s, id: %s' % (file1['title'], file1['id']))

Now all you need to do is tweak the search parameters, since you know the title of the file already. See docs.

file_list = drive.ListFile({'q': "name='pretrained_vgg19.mat' and trashed=false"}).GetList()
for file in file_list:
  print('%s' % (file['id']))

Note that it is possible to have files with the same folder name and file name, because you can create multiple folders with identical paths in Google Drive. If there is even a chance of this, you will get multiple files returned in your list operation and will need to use some other criteria in order to select the correct one.

Answer 2

user244343's answer didn't work for me since the gauth object doesn't exist. I did this instead (test.zip needs to point to the right folder and file in your Drive!):

!apt-get install -qq xattr
filename = "/content/drive/My\ Drive/test.zip"
# Retrieving the file ID for a file in `"/content/drive/My Drive/"`:
id = !xattr -p 'user.drive.id' {filename}
print(id)