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File System Tools

LangChain provides tools for interacting with a local file system out of the box. This notebook walks through some of them.

Note: these tools are not recommended for use outside a sandboxed environment!

First, we'll import the tools.

from langchain.tools.file_management import (
    ReadFileTool,
    CopyFileTool,
    DeleteFileTool,
    MoveFileTool,
    WriteFileTool,
    ListDirectoryTool,
)
from langchain.agents.agent_toolkits import FileManagementToolkit
from tempfile import TemporaryDirectory

# We'll make a temporary directory to avoid clutter
working_directory = TemporaryDirectory()

The FileManagementToolkit​

If you want to provide all the file tooling to your agent, it's easy to do so with the toolkit. We'll pass the temporary directory in as a root directory as a workspace for the LLM.

It's recommended to always pass in a root directory, since without one, it's easy for the LLM to pollute the working directory, and without one, there isn't any validation against straightforward prompt injection.

toolkit = FileManagementToolkit(
    root_dir=str(working_directory.name)
)  # If you don't provide a root_dir, operations will default to the current working directory
toolkit.get_tools()
[CopyFileTool(name='copy_file', description='Create a copy of a file in a specified location', args_schema=<class 'langchain.tools.file_management.copy.FileCopyInput'>, return_direct=False, verbose=False, callback_manager=<langchain.callbacks.shared.SharedCallbackManager object at 0x1156f4350>, root_dir='/var/folders/gf/6rnp_mbx5914kx7qmmh7xzmw0000gn/T/tmpxb8c3aug'),
 DeleteFileTool(name='file_delete', description='Delete a file', args_schema=<class 'langchain.tools.file_management.delete.FileDeleteInput'>, return_direct=False, verbose=False, callback_manager=<langchain.callbacks.shared.SharedCallbackManager object at 0x1156f4350>, root_dir='/var/folders/gf/6rnp_mbx5914kx7qmmh7xzmw0000gn/T/tmpxb8c3aug'),
 FileSearchTool(name='file_search', description='Recursively search for files in a subdirectory that match the regex pattern', args_schema=<class 'langchain.tools.file_management.file_search.FileSearchInput'>, return_direct=False, verbose=False, callback_manager=<langchain.callbacks.shared.SharedCallbackManager object at 0x1156f4350>, root_dir='/var/folders/gf/6rnp_mbx5914kx7qmmh7xzmw0000gn/T/tmpxb8c3aug'),
 MoveFileTool(name='move_file', description='Move or rename a file from one location to another', args_schema=<class 'langchain.tools.file_management.move.FileMoveInput'>, return_direct=False, verbose=False, callback_manager=<langchain.callbacks.shared.SharedCallbackManager object at 0x1156f4350>, root_dir='/var/folders/gf/6rnp_mbx5914kx7qmmh7xzmw0000gn/T/tmpxb8c3aug'),
 ReadFileTool(name='read_file', description='Read file from disk', args_schema=<class 'langchain.tools.file_management.read.ReadFileInput'>, return_direct=False, verbose=False, callback_manager=<langchain.callbacks.shared.SharedCallbackManager object at 0x1156f4350>, root_dir='/var/folders/gf/6rnp_mbx5914kx7qmmh7xzmw0000gn/T/tmpxb8c3aug'),
 WriteFileTool(name='write_file', description='Write file to disk', args_schema=<class 'langchain.tools.file_management.write.WriteFileInput'>, return_direct=False, verbose=False, callback_manager=<langchain.callbacks.shared.SharedCallbackManager object at 0x1156f4350>, root_dir='/var/folders/gf/6rnp_mbx5914kx7qmmh7xzmw0000gn/T/tmpxb8c3aug'),
 ListDirectoryTool(name='list_directory', description='List files and directories in a specified folder', args_schema=<class 'langchain.tools.file_management.list_dir.DirectoryListingInput'>, return_direct=False, verbose=False, callback_manager=<langchain.callbacks.shared.SharedCallbackManager object at 0x1156f4350>, root_dir='/var/folders/gf/6rnp_mbx5914kx7qmmh7xzmw0000gn/T/tmpxb8c3aug')]

Selecting File System Tools​

If you only want to select certain tools, you can pass them in as arguments when initializing the toolkit, or you can individually initialize the desired tools.

tools = FileManagementToolkit(
    root_dir=str(working_directory.name),
    selected_tools=["read_file", "write_file", "list_directory"],
).get_tools()
tools
[ReadFileTool(name='read_file', description='Read file from disk', args_schema=<class 'langchain.tools.file_management.read.ReadFileInput'>, return_direct=False, verbose=False, callback_manager=<langchain.callbacks.shared.SharedCallbackManager object at 0x1156f4350>, root_dir='/var/folders/gf/6rnp_mbx5914kx7qmmh7xzmw0000gn/T/tmpxb8c3aug'),
 WriteFileTool(name='write_file', description='Write file to disk', args_schema=<class 'langchain.tools.file_management.write.WriteFileInput'>, return_direct=False, verbose=False, callback_manager=<langchain.callbacks.shared.SharedCallbackManager object at 0x1156f4350>, root_dir='/var/folders/gf/6rnp_mbx5914kx7qmmh7xzmw0000gn/T/tmpxb8c3aug'),
 ListDirectoryTool(name='list_directory', description='List files and directories in a specified folder', args_schema=<class 'langchain.tools.file_management.list_dir.DirectoryListingInput'>, return_direct=False, verbose=False, callback_manager=<langchain.callbacks.shared.SharedCallbackManager object at 0x1156f4350>, root_dir='/var/folders/gf/6rnp_mbx5914kx7qmmh7xzmw0000gn/T/tmpxb8c3aug')]
read_tool, write_tool, list_tool = tools
write_tool.run({"file_path": "example.txt", "text": "Hello World!"})
'File written successfully to example.txt.'
# List files in the working directory
list_tool.run({})
'example.txt'