scriptine.path – work with files and directories

Module Contents

class scriptine.path

Operations on path

classmethod path.cwd()

Return the current working directory as a path object.

path.isabs(s)

Test whether a path is absolute

path.abspath()
path.normcase()
path.normpath()
path.realpath()
path.expanduser()
path.expandvars()
path.dirname()
path.basename(p)

Returns the final component of a pathname

path.parent

This path’s parent directory, as a new path object.

For example, path(‘/usr/local/lib/libpython.so’).parent == path(‘/usr/local/lib’)

path.name

The name of this file or directory without the full path.

For example, path(‘/usr/local/lib/libpython.so’).name == ‘libpython.so’

path.namebase

The same as path.name, but with one file extension stripped off.

For example, path(‘/home/guido/python.tar.gz’).name == ‘python.tar.gz’, but path(‘/home/guido/python.tar.gz’).namebase == ‘python.tar’

path.ext

The file extension, for example ‘.py’.

path.drive

The drive specifier, for example ‘C:’. This is always empty on systems that don’t use drive specifiers.

path.expand()

Clean up a filename by calling expandvars(), expanduser(), and normpath() on it.

This is commonly everything needed to clean up a filename read from a configuration file, for example.

path.splitpath() → Return (p.parent, p.name).
path.splitdrive() → Return (p.drive, <the rest of p>).

Split the drive specifier from this path. If there is no drive specifier, p.drive is empty, so the return value is simply (path(‘’), p). This is always the case on Unix.

path.splitext() → Return (p.stripext(), p.ext).

Split the filename extension from this path and return the two parts. Either part may be empty.

The extension is everything from ‘.’ to the end of the last path segment. This has the property that if (a, b) == p.splitext(), then a + b == p.

path.stripext() → Remove one file extension from the path.

For example, path(‘/home/guido/python.tar.gz’).stripext() returns path(‘/home/guido/python.tar’).

path.joinpath(*args)

Join two or more path components, adding a separator character (os.sep) if needed. Returns a new path object.

path.splitall()

Return a list of the path components in this path.

The first item in the list will be a path. Its value will be either os.curdir, os.pardir, empty, or the root directory of this path (for example, / or C:\). The other items in the list will be strings.

path.path.joinpath(*result) will yield the original path.

path.relpath()

Return this path as a relative path, based from the current working directory.

path.relpathto(dest)

Return a relative path from self to dest.

If there is no relative path from self to dest, for example if they reside on different drives in Windows, then this returns dest.abspath().

path.as_working_dir(*args, **kwds)

temporarily change into this directory

>>> with path('/').as_working_dir():
...     assert path.cwd() == '/'
>>> assert path.cwd() != '/'

Listing, searching, walking, and matching

path.listdir() → List of items in this directory.

Use D.files() or D.dirs() instead if you want a listing of just files or just subdirectories.

The elements of the list are path objects.

With the optional ‘pattern’ argument, this only lists items whose names match the given pattern.

path.dirs() → List of this directory's subdirectories.

The elements of the list are path objects. This does not walk recursively into subdirectories (but see path.walkdirs()).

With the optional pattern argument, this only lists directories whose names match the given pattern. For example, d.dirs('build-*').

path.files() → List of the files in this directory.

The elements of the list are path objects. This does not walk into subdirectories (see path.walkfiles()).

With the optional pattern argument, this only lists files whose names match the given pattern. For example, d.files('*.pyc').

path.walk() → iterator over files and subdirs, recursively.

The iterator yields path objects naming each child item of this directory and its descendants. This requires that D.isdir().

This performs a depth-first traversal of the directory tree. Each directory is returned just before all its children.

The errors keyword argument controls behavior when an error occurs. The default is strict, which causes an exception. The other allowed values are ‘warn’, which reports the error via warnings.warn(), and ignore.

path.walkdirs() → iterator over subdirs, recursively.

With the optional pattern argument, this yields only directories whose names match the given pattern. For example, mydir.walkdirs('*test') yields only directories with names ending in test.

The errors keyword argument controls behavior when an error occurs. The default is strict, which causes an exception. The other allowed values are warn, which reports the error via warnings.warn(), and ignore.

path.walkfiles() → iterator over files in D, recursively.

The optional argument, pattern, limits the results to files with names that match the pattern. For example, mydir.walkfiles('*.tmp') yields only files with the .tmp extension.

path.fnmatch(pattern)

Return True if path matches the given pattern.

pattern - A filename pattern with wildcards,
for example *.py.
path.glob(pattern)

Return a list of path objects that match the pattern.

pattern - a path relative to this directory, with wildcards.

For example, path('/users').glob('*/bin/*') returns a list of all the files users have in their bin directories.

Reading and writing files

path.open(mode='r')

Open this file. Return a file object.

path.bytes()

Open this file, read all bytes, return them as a string.

path.write_bytes(bytes, append=False)

Open this file and write the given bytes to it.

Default behavior is to overwrite any existing file. Call p.write_bytes(bytes, append=True) to append instead.

path.text(encoding=None, errors='strict')

Open this file, read it in, return the content as a string.

This uses ‘U’ mode in Python 2.3 and later, so ‘rn’ and ‘r’ are automatically translated to ‘n’.

Optional arguments:

encoding - The Unicode encoding (or character set) of
the file. If present, the content of the file is decoded and returned as a unicode object; otherwise it is returned as an 8-bit str.
errors - How to handle Unicode errors; see help(str.decode)
for the options. Default is ‘strict’.
path.write_text(text, encoding=None, errors='strict', linesep='n', append=False)

Write the given text to this file.

The default behavior is to overwrite any existing file; to append instead, use the ‘append=True’ keyword argument.

There are two differences between path.write_text() and path.write_bytes(): newline handling and Unicode handling. See below.

Parameters:

  • text - str/unicode - The text to be written.
  • encoding - str - The Unicode encoding that will be used. This is ignored if ‘text’ isn’t a Unicode string.
  • errors - str - How to handle Unicode encoding errors. Default is ‘strict’. See help(unicode.encode) for the options. This is ignored if ‘text’ isn’t a Unicode string.
  • linesep - keyword argument - str/unicode - The sequence of characters to be used to mark end-of-line. The default is os.linesep. You can also specify None; this means to leave all newlines as they are in ‘text’.
  • append - keyword argument - bool - Specifies what to do if the file already exists (True: append to the end of it; False: overwrite it.) The default is False.

— Newline handling.

write_text() converts all standard end-of-line sequences (‘n’, ‘r’, and ‘rn’) to your platform’s default end-of-line sequence (see os.linesep; on Windows, for example, the end-of-line marker is ‘rn’).

If you don’t like your platform’s default, you can override it using the ‘linesep=’ keyword argument. If you specifically want write_text() to preserve the newlines as-is, use ‘linesep=None’.

This applies to Unicode text the same as to 8-bit text, except there are three additional standard Unicode end-of-line sequences: u’x85’, u’rx85’, and u’u2028’.

(This is slightly different from when you open a file for writing with fopen(filename, “w”) in C or file(filename, ‘w’) in Python.)

— Unicode

If ‘text’ isn’t Unicode, then apart from newline handling, the bytes are written verbatim to the file. The ‘encoding’ and ‘errors’ arguments are not used and must be omitted.

If ‘text’ is Unicode, it is first converted to bytes using the specified ‘encoding’ (or the default encoding if ‘encoding’ isn’t specified). The ‘errors’ argument applies only to this conversion.

path.lines(encoding=None, errors='strict', retain=True)

Open this file, read all lines, return them in a list.

Optional arguments:
encoding - The Unicode encoding (or character set) of
the file. The default is None, meaning the content of the file is read as 8-bit characters and returned as a list of (non-Unicode) str objects.
errors - How to handle Unicode errors; see help(str.decode)
for the options. Default is ‘strict’
retain - If true, retain newline characters; but all newline
character combinations (‘r’, ‘n’, ‘rn’) are translated to ‘n’. If false, newline characters are stripped off. Default is True.

This uses ‘U’ mode in Python 2.3 and later.

path.write_lines(lines, encoding=None, errors='strict', linesep='n', append=False)

Write the given lines of text to this file.

By default this overwrites any existing file at this path.

This puts a platform-specific newline sequence on every line. See ‘linesep’ below.

lines - A list of strings.

encoding - A Unicode encoding to use. This applies only if
‘lines’ contains any Unicode strings.
errors - How to handle errors in Unicode encoding. This
also applies only to Unicode strings.
linesep - The desired line-ending. This line-ending is
applied to every line. If a line already has any standard line ending (‘r’, ‘n’, ‘rn’, u’x85’, u’rx85’, u’u2028’), that will be stripped off and this will be used instead. The default is os.linesep, which is platform-dependent (‘rn’ on Windows, ‘n’ on Unix, etc.) Specify None to write the lines as-is, like file.writelines().

Use the keyword argument append=True to append lines to the file. The default is to overwrite the file. Warning: When you use this with Unicode data, if the encoding of the existing data in the file is different from the encoding you specify with the encoding= parameter, the result is mixed-encoding data, which can really confuse someone trying to read the file later.

path.read_md5(hex=False)

Calculate the md5 hash for this file.

hex - Return the digest as hex string.

This reads through the entire file.

Querying the filesystem

path.exists()

Test whether a path exists. Returns False for broken symbolic links

path.isdir()

Return true if the pathname refers to an existing directory.

path.isfile()

Test whether a path is a regular file

Test whether a path is a symbolic link

path.ismount()

Test whether a path is a mount point

path.samefile(other)

Test whether two pathnames reference the same actual file

path.atime()

Return the last access time of a file, reported by os.stat().

path.mtime()

Return the last modification time of a file, reported by os.stat().

path.ctime()

Return the metadata change time of a file, reported by os.stat().

path.newer(other)
path.size()

Return the size of a file, reported by os.stat().

path.access(mode)

Return true if current user has access to this path.

mode - One of the constants os.F_OK, os.R_OK, os.W_OK, os.X_OK

path.stat()

Perform a stat() system call on this path.

path.lstat()

Like path.stat(), but do not follow symbolic links.

path.statvfs()

Perform a statvfs() system call on this path.

path.pathconf(name)

Modifying files and directories

path.utime(path, (atime, mtime))

utime(path, None)

Set the access and modified time of the file to the given values. If the second form is used, set the access and modified times to the current time.

path.chmod(path, mode)

Change the access permissions of a file.

path.chown(path, uid, gid)

Change the owner and group id of path to the numeric uid and gid.

path.rename(old, new)

Rename a file or directory.

path.renames(old, new)

Super-rename; create directories as necessary and delete any left empty. Works like rename, except creation of any intermediate directories needed to make the new pathname good is attempted first. After the rename, directories corresponding to rightmost path segments of the old name will be pruned way until either the whole path is consumed or a nonempty directory is found.

Note: this function can fail with the new directory structure made if you lack permissions needed to unlink the leaf directory or file.

Create/delete directories

path.mkdir(mode=511)
path.makedirs(mode=511)
path.rmdir()
path.removedirs()
path.ensure_dir(mode=511)

Make sure the directory exists, create if necessary.

Modify files

path.touch()

Set the access/modified times of this file to the current time. Create the file if it does not exist.

path.remove()

Create a hard link at ‘newpath’, pointing to this file.

Create a symbolic link at ‘newlink’, pointing here.

Return the path to which this symbolic link points.

The result may be an absolute or a relative path.

path.readlinkabs()

Return the path to which this symbolic link points.

The result is always an absolute path.

Shell utils

All methods except path.install() come from shutil.

path.copyfile(src, dst)

Copy data from src to dst

path.copymode(src, dst)

Copy mode bits from src to dst

path.copystat(src, dst)

Copy all stat info (mode bits, atime, mtime, flags) from src to dst

path.copy(src, dst)

Copy data and mode bits (“cp src dst”).

The destination may be a directory.

path.copy2(src, dst)

Copy data and all stat info (“cp -p src dst”).

The destination may be a directory.

path.copytree(src, dst, symlinks=False, ignore=None)

Recursively copy a directory tree using copy2().

The destination directory must not already exist. If exception(s) occur, an Error is raised with a list of reasons.

If the optional symlinks flag is true, symbolic links in the source tree result in symbolic links in the destination tree; if it is false, the contents of the files pointed to by symbolic links are copied.

The optional ignore argument is a callable. If given, it is called with the src parameter, which is the directory being visited by copytree(), and names which is the list of src contents, as returned by os.listdir():

callable(src, names) -> ignored_names

Since copytree() is called recursively, the callable will be called once for each directory that is copied. It returns a list of names relative to the src directory that should not be copied.

XXX Consider this example code rather than the ultimate tool.

path.move(src, dst)

Recursively move a file or directory to another location. This is similar to the Unix “mv” command.

If the destination is a directory or a symlink to a directory, the source is moved inside the directory. The destination path must not already exist.

If the destination already exists but is not a directory, it may be overwritten depending on os.rename() semantics.

If the destination is on our current filesystem, then rename() is used. Otherwise, src is copied to the destination and then removed. A lot more could be done here... A look at a mv.c shows a lot of the issues this implementation glosses over.

path.rmtree(path, ignore_errors=False, onerror=None)

Recursively delete a directory tree.

If ignore_errors is set, errors are ignored; otherwise, if onerror is set, it is called to handle the error with arguments (func, path, exc_info) where func is os.listdir, os.remove, or os.rmdir; path is the argument to that function that caused it to fail; and exc_info is a tuple returned by sys.exc_info(). If ignore_errors is false and onerror is None, an exception is raised.

path.install(to, chmod=420)

Copy data and set mode to ‘chmod’.

Other methods

path.chroot()