I suggest a small change in os.walk module.  

Instead of:
def walk(top, topdown=True, onerror=None, followlinks=False):

I would like to have:
def walk(top, topdown=True, onerror=None, skipnames=lambda x : False, skipdirs=islink):

Implementation might be as follows:

<         if isdir(join(top, name)):
---
>         fullname=join(top, name)
>         if skipnames(fullname):
>             continue
>         if isdir(fullname):

and:

<         if followlinks or not islink(new_path):
<             for x in walk(new_path, topdown, onerror, followlinks):
---
>         if not skipdirs(new_path):
>             for x in walk(new_path, topdown, onerror, skipnames, skipdirs):

This is a small change, breaks a bit 'followlinks' option but gives
much more flexibility as skipnames and skidirs can be any 
functions (including ones using regexp and similar).

Thanks for the report.  2.7 is a stable version, so this would have to go in 3.3.  Even where, breaking the function signature wouldn’t be possible, so we would have to add arguments without removing any.

Have you looked at shutil.rmtree’s ignore argument and the shutil.ignore_patterns factory function?  Maybe that would be a good pattern to copy.

Looks like the proper way to do it is described in the manual:
http://docs.python.org/dev/library/os.html#os.walk

for root, dirs, files in os.walk('python/Lib/email'):
    if 'CVS' in dirs:
        dirs.remove('CVS')  # don't visit CVS directories
    .....

I checked that it is covered by unit tests in /test_os.py so it is safe to use and bug can blo closed as invalid.