The Quick Python Book, Third Edition

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, ...