10 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:

• 1. os.path — Common pathname manipulations
• 2. fileinput — Iterate over lines from multiple input streams
• 3. stat — Interpreting stat() results
• 4. statvfs — Constants used with os.statvfs()
• 5. filecmp — File and Directory Comparisons
• 6. tempfile — Generate temporary files and directories
• 7. glob — Unix style pathname pattern expansion
• 8. fnmatch — Unix filename pattern matching
• 9. linecache — Random access to text lines
• 10. shutil — High-level file operations
• 11. dircache — Cached directory listings
• 12. macpath — Mac OS 9 path manipulation functions

See also

Section File Objects

A description of Python’s built-in file objects.

Module os

Operating system interfaces, including functions to work with files at a lower level than the built-in file object.