Another newbie question

[SA]

I am trying to find a way to list the contents of a directory into a list so
that the contents of the list are then read into an html doc as hrefs.

What I'm looking for is a way to ls a directory. Is there a way to access
the shell command ls from within a python script and dumping the output into
a list for further manipulation? Or does this have to be built from the
ground up inside the python script?

Thanks.
SA