
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:

* "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

* "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

    * copytree example

  * Archiving operations

    * Archiving example

  * Querying the size of the output terminal

* "macpath" --- Mac OS 9 path manipulation functions

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.
