How to tell if I can open a file or not

[Skip Hollowell]

I have a indexer that I am writing that goest through a user-specified
directory and all subdirectories and indexes all the .htm* file contained
therein.  This works great until I get to a file that someone has chmod-ed
so that I can't read it.  Then I bomb after the open().

Is there a way I can check the attrbutes of the file before I open it?  This
is easy enough in c or perl, but have yet to find an equivalent in Python.

Thanks for any and all help, and I would appreciate being copied on email as
well as the group as I don't always have access to newsgroups where I am at.

Skip Hollowell
skip_hollowell 'at' yahoo.com