Core Python Programming (2nd Edition)

[]
*** creating test file...
*** updated directory listing:
['test']
*** renaming 'test' to 'filetest.txt'
*** updated directory listing:
['filetest.txt']
*** full file pathname:
c:\windows\temp\example\filetest.txt
*** (pathname, basename) ==
('c:\\windows\\temp\\example', 'filetest.txt')
*** (filename, extension) ==
('filetest', '.txt')
*** displaying file contents:
foo
bar
*** deleting test file
*** updated directory listing:
[]
*** deleting test directory
*** DONE
Rather than providing a line-by-line explanation here, we will leave it to the reader as an exercise.
However, we will walk through a similar interactive example (including errors) to give you a feel for
what it is like to execute this script one step at a time. We will break into the code every now and then
to describe the code we just encountered.
>>> import os
>>> os.path.isdir('/tmp')
True
>>> os.chdir('/tmp')
>>> cwd = os.getcwd()
>>> cwd
'/tmp'
This first block of code consists of importing the os module (which also grabs the os.path module). We
verify that '/tmp' is a valid directory and change to that temporary directory to do our work. When we
arrive, we call the getcwd() method to tell us where we are.
>>> os.mkdir('example')
>>> os.chdir('example')
>>> cwd = os.getcwd()
>>> cwd
'/tmp/example'
>>>
>>> os.listdir() # oops, forgot name
Traceback (innermost last):
File "", line 1, in ?
TypeError: function requires at least one argument
>>>
>>> os.listdir(cwd) # that's better :)
[]
Next, we create a subdirectory in our temporary directory, after which we will use the listdir() method