Chapter 12. Using the filesystem
This chapter covers
- Managing paths and pathnames
- Getting information about files
- Performing filesystem operations
- Processing all files in a directory subtree
Working with files involves one of two things: basic I/O (described in chapter 13, “Reading and writing files”) and working with the filesystem (for example, naming, creating, moving, or referring to files), which is a bit tricky, because different operating systems have different filesystem conventions.
It would be easy enough to learn how to perform basic file I/O without learning all the features Python has provided to simplify cross-platform filesystem interaction—but I wouldn’t recommend it. Instead, read at least the first part of this chapter, which gives you the tools you need to refer to files in a manner that doesn’t depend on your particular operating system. Then, when you use the basic I/O operations, you can open the relevant files in this manner.