stat, chmod and RDONLY file (win32)?

[T. C. Mits]

(newbie alert!)
I'm writing a file directory manipulation and system utility executor in
Python, since its supposed to be a good glue scripting language.
(anything, better?)

Hitting a lot of stumbling blocks.   Latest is trying to delete a directory
tree that may have files with a read-only attrib (in NT and win98).      The
exception occurs in shutil.rmtree(), so I guess I'll have to cobble
something to find such files and chg the attributes.   I found os.stat(),
chmod() and stat module, but the docs are a little shallow.   Does the doc
for chmod(): "Change the mode of path to the numeric mode. Availability:
Unix, Windows" mean that one must supply the c-run-time bit flags,
documented elsewhere (where?), as mentioned in the open() API blurb, such as
O_RDONLY.     Sorry, if this is dumb question, lately I *have* been a little
dumb.   There are probably better alternatives to do a 'safe' deltree...

I wrote a little ditty to show file status, maybe?:
def fstat( name) :
   print "%s: [%s]" % (  name,hex( os.stat(name)[ST_MODE] )  )

and get:
locked.txt: [0x8124]
temp.txt: [0x81b6]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Hopefully, when this is working and must be used on Unix, there will be no
code changes necessary, right?  : )