11. File and Directory Access

The modules described in this chapter deal with disk files and directories. For example, there are modules for reading the properties of files, manipulating paths in a portable way, and creating temporary files. The full list of modules in this chapter is:

• 11.1. os.path — Common pathname manipulations
• 11.2. fileinput — Iterate over lines from multiple input streams
• 11.3. stat — Interpreting stat() results
• 11.4. filecmp — File and Directory Comparisons
  • 11.4.1. The dircmp class
• 11.5. tempfile — Generate temporary files and directories
  • 11.5.1. Examples
• 11.6. glob — Unix style pathname pattern expansion
• 11.7. fnmatch — Unix filename pattern matching
• 11.8. linecache — Random access to text lines
• 11.9. shutil — High-level file operations
  • 11.9.1. Directory and files operations
    • 11.9.1.1. copytree example
  • 11.9.2. Archiving operations
    • 11.9.2.1. Archiving example
  • 11.9.3. Querying the size of the output terminal
• 11.10. macpath — Mac OS 9 path manipulation functions

See also

Module os

Operating system interfaces, including functions to work with files at a lower level than Python file objects.

Module io

Python’s built-in I/O library, including both abstract classes and some concrete classes such as file I/O.

Built-in function open()

The standard way to open files for reading and writing with Python.