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:

• os.path — Common pathname manipulations

• fileinput — Iterate over lines from multiple input streams

• stat — Interpreting stat results

• statvfs — Constants used with os.statvfs

• filecmp — File and Directory Comparisons
  • The dircmp class

• tempfile — Generate temporary files and directories

• glob — Unix style pathname pattern expansion

• fnmatch — Unix filename pattern matching

• linecache — Random access to text lines

• shutil — High-level file operations
  • Example

• dircache — Cached directory listings

• 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.