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
  • Exceptions
  • Pure paths
    • General properties
    • Operators
    • Accessing individual parts
    • Methods and properties
  • Concrete paths
    • Parsing and generating URIs
    • Expanding and resolving paths
    • Querying file type and status
    • Reading and writing files
    • Reading directories
    • Creating files and directories
    • Copying, moving and deleting
    • Permissions and ownership
  • Pattern language
  • Comparison to the glob module
  • Comparison to the os and os.path modules
    • Corresponding tools
  • Protocols
• os.path Common pathname manipulations
• 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
  • Examples
• fnmatch Unix filename pattern matching
• linecache Random access to text lines
• shutil High-level file operations
  • Directory and files operations
    • Platform-dependent efficient copy operations
    • copytree example
    • rmtree example
  • Archiving operations
    • Archiving example
    • Archiving example with base_dir
  • Querying the size of the output terminal

See also

Module os

Operating system interfaces, including functions to work with files at a lower level than Python file objects.

Module io

Pythons 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.