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# 11. 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:

- 11.1. `os.path` — Common pathname manipulations
- 11.2. `fileinput` — Iterate over lines from multiple input streams
- 11.3. `stat` — Interpreting `stat()` results
- 11.4. `filecmp` — File and Directory Comparisons
  - 11.4.1. The `dircmp` class
- 11.5. `tempfile` — Generate temporary files and directories
  - 11.5.1. Examples
- 11.6. `glob` — Unix style pathname pattern expansion
- 11.7. `fnmatch` — Unix filename pattern matching
- 11.8. `linecache` — Random access to text lines
- 11.9. `shutil` — High-level file operations
  - 11.9.1. Directory and files operations
    - 11.9.1.1. copytree example
  - 11.9.2. Archiving operations
    - 11.9.2.1. Archiving example
  - 11.9.3. Querying the size of the output terminal
- 11.10. `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.

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