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:

• 10.1. os.path — Common pathname manipulations
• 10.2. fileinput — Iterate over lines from multiple input streams
• 10.3. stat — Interpreting stat() results
• 10.4. filecmp — File and Directory Comparisons
  • 10.4.1. The dircmp class
• 10.5. tempfile — Generate temporary files and directories
• 10.6. glob — Unix style pathname pattern expansion
• 10.7. fnmatch — Unix filename pattern matching
• 10.8. linecache — Random access to text lines
• 10.9. shutil — High-level file operations
  • 10.9.1. Example
• 10.10. 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.

Module io

Python’s framework for dealing with I/O including reading and writing files.