A little disappointed so far

[Steven Taschuk]

Quoth Graham Nicholls:
> Skip Montanaro wrote:
  [...]
> > But wrong. ;-) os.access is almost never what you want.  Try
> > os.path.exists() instead.
>
> Interesting, why ?

The Library Reference says:

    access(path, mode)
        Use the real uid/gid to test for access to path. Note that most
        operations will use the effective uid/gid, therefore this routine
        can be used in a suid/sgid environment to test if the invoking
        user has the specified access to path.  [...]

Seems clear enough.

> [...] And why did I not find this [...]

You really should take a few minutes to go through the Library
Reference and at least look at every module.  (For most of them,
of course, this'll be just a glance long enough to read the first
paragraph and decide you don't care right now.)

In fact, I'm surprised you haven't done this already; skimming
reference material looking for interesting bits seems like a
strategy you'd have picked up in your years of programming.

> [...] - the books would just talk
> about the os module without saying what it offered beyond the specific
> function they were then talking about.

*shrug*  Constraints of space, perhaps.  Who knows?  (Well, the
authors, I suppose; some of them read and post here, so you might
get a reply from the horse's mouth.)

In any case, the Library Reference is your friend.

-- 
Steven Taschuk                               staschuk at telusplanet.net
"[T]rue greatness is when your name is like ampere, watt, and fourier
 -- when it's spelled with a lower case letter."      -- R.W. Hamming