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. pathlib — Object-oriented filesystem paths
  • 11.1.1. Basic use
  • 11.1.2. Pure paths
    • 11.1.2.1. General properties
    • 11.1.2.2. Operators
    • 11.1.2.3. Accessing individual parts
    • 11.1.2.4. Methods and properties
  • 11.1.3. Concrete paths
    • 11.1.3.1. Methods
• 11.2. os.path — Common pathname manipulations
• 11.3. fileinput — Iterate over lines from multiple input streams
• 11.4. stat — Interpreting stat() results
• 11.5. filecmp — File and Directory Comparisons
  • 11.5.1. The dircmp class
• 11.6. tempfile — Generate temporary files and directories
  • 11.6.1. Examples
  • 11.6.2. Deprecated functions and variables
• 11.7. glob — Unix style pathname pattern expansion
• 11.8. fnmatch — Unix filename pattern matching
• 11.9. linecache — Random access to text lines
• 11.10. shutil — High-level file operations
  • 11.10.1. Directory and files operations
    • 11.10.1.1. copytree example
    • 11.10.1.2. rmtree example
  • 11.10.2. Archiving operations
    • 11.10.2.1. Archiving example
  • 11.10.3. Querying the size of the output terminal
• 11.11. 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.