File and Directory Access — Python documentation

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
    • 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

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.