analyzing removable media

[Nick Vatamaniuc]

glenn wrote:
> Hi
> can anyone tell me how given a directory or file path, I can
> pythonically  tell if that item is on 'removable media', or sometype of
> vfs, the label of the media (or volume) and perhaps any other details
> about the media itself?
> thanks
> Glenn

It won't be trivial because one of the goals of the operating systems
is to hide the differences between various types of storage devices and
make them all look the same (i.e. a jump drive, a CD-ROM, a network
volume are presented uniformly to the user as just another path in the
file system).

But you can probably use guesswork on unix OS's, as somebody above
suggested, and examine the path. If the path contains common media
mount points then that should give you a clue. On Windows you cannot
easily know. For example if your file is on D:\file.txt, it is not
immediatly obvious if D is a jumpdrive, a networked drive, a hard
drive, or a CD-ROM.

The only thing I can think of is to try to examine the Windows registry
with the _winreg module. Here are the docs:
http://docs.python.org/lib/module--winreg.html  There might be a key
burried in there some place that will tell you which drives are what
type.