The Quick Python Book, Third Edition

Chapter 20. Basic file wrangling

This chapter covers

• Moving and renaming files
• Compressing and encrypting files
• Selectively deleting files

This chapter deals with the basic operations you can use when you have an ever-increasing collection of files to manage. Those files might be log files, or they might be from a regular data feed, but whatever their source, you can’t simply discard them immediately. How do you save them, manage them, and ultimately dispose of them according to a plan, but without manual intervention?

20.1. The problem: The never-ending flow of data files

Many systems generate a continuous series of data files. These files might be the log files from an e-commerce server or a regular process; they might be a nightly feed ...