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:

• pathlib — Object-oriented filesystem paths
  • Basic use
  • Pure paths
    • General properties
    • Operators
    • Accessing individual parts
    • Methods and properties
  • Concrete paths
    • Methods
  • Correspondence to tools in the os module
• os.path — Common pathname manipulations
• fileinput — Iterate over lines from multiple input streams
• stat — Interpreting stat() results
• filecmp — File and Directory Comparisons
  • The dircmp class
• tempfile — Generate temporary files and directories
  • Examples
  • Deprecated functions and variables
• glob — Unix style pathname pattern expansion
• fnmatch — Unix filename pattern matching
• linecache — Random access to text lines
• shutil — High-level file operations
  • Directory and files operations
    • copytree example
    • rmtree example
  • Archiving operations
    • Archiving example
  • Querying the size of the output terminal
• 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.