Do I understand os.walk right?

os.walk returns a generator, that creates a tuple of values (current_path, directories in current_path, files in current_path).

Every time the generator is called it will follow each directory recursively until no further sub-directories are available from the initial directory that walk was called upon.

As such,

os.walk('C:\dir1\dir2\startdir').next()[0] # returns 'C:\dir1\dir2\startdir'
os.walk('C:\dir1\dir2\startdir').next()[1] # returns all the dirs in 'C:\dir1\dir2\startdir'
os.walk('C:\dir1\dir2\startdir').next()[2] # returns all the files in 'C:\dir1\dir2\startdir'

So

import os.path
....
for path, directories, files in os.walk('C:\dir1\dir2\startdir'):
     if file in files:
          print('found %s' % os.path.join(path, file))

or this

def search_file(directory = None, file = None):
    assert os.path.isdir(directory)
    for cur_path, directories, files in os.walk(directory):
        if file in files:
            return os.path.join(directory, cur_path, file)
    return None

or if you want to look for file you can do this:

import os
def search_file(directory = None, file = None):
    assert os.path.isdir(directory)
    current_path, directories, files = os.walk(directory).next()
    if file in files:
        return os.path.join(directory, file)
    elif directories == '':
        return None
    else:
        for new_directory in directories:
            result = search_file(directory = os.path.join(directory, new_directory), file = file)
            if result:
                return result
        return None

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