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, ...

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