Lecture 19

The os module

MCS 260 Fall 2020
David Dumas

Reminders

The os module

        import os
    

gives your program access to lots of functions that ask the operating system to do things.

Today we focus on the filesystem operations in this module.

Live coding

• shell_10am.py
• shell_2pm.py

Shell commands

• pwd - print working directory
• cd - change working directory
• ls - list files in a directory
• cat - display file contents
• rm - remove a file
• mkdir - create a directory
• rmdir - remove a directory

os module methods

• os.getcwd() - get working directory
• os.chdir(dirname) - change working directory
• os.listdir(dirname) - get list of files in directory
• os.mkdir(dirname) - create a directory
• os.rmdir(dirname) - remove a directory
• os.remove(filename) - remove a file

os module methods

• os.path.join(part0,part1,...) - join path components (using proper separator for the OS)
• os.path.exists(name) - True if name exists
• os.path.isfile(name) - True if name is a file
• os.path.isdir(name) - True if name is a directory