# 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:

- `pathlib` — Object-oriented filesystem paths
  - Basic use
  - Pure paths
    - General properties
    - Operators
    - Accessing individual parts
    - Methods and properties
  - Concrete paths
    - Expanding and resolving paths
    - Querying file type and status
    - Reading and writing files
    - Reading directories
    - Creating files and directories
    - Renaming and deleting
    - Permissions and ownership
  - Correspondence to tools in the `os` module
- `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
  - Deprecated functions and variables
- `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
    - Platform-dependent efficient copy operations
    - copytree example
    - rmtree example
  - Archiving operations
    - Archiving example
    - Archiving example with base_dir
  - Querying the size of the output terminal

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.