[Chicago] Reading From a Directory

[Clyde Forrester]

What I want to do is open a directory and read file names from it.

The standard answer I get by Googling seems to be:
No you don't. Are you mad? Why would you want to do that? Clearly you 
want to do something else. It's a scripting language and you have no 
business "programming" in it. Why don't you just pass the buck to a 
shell (os.popen) and handle it that way? Or use a magic module 
glob.glob) to get a complete list, or something.

Perl and Ruby have directory classes with open, read, and close methods. 
Why doesn't Python?

Now it does occur to me that any time I want to read from a directory, I 
want all the files. Even if I'm using a wild card, I want to apply it to 
all the files in the directory, not just the first one or two. But 
somehow calling out to a shell, or invoking a module seems as "easy" as 
hiring a subcontractor to tie my shoes. I don't things have to get that 
complicated.

c4