[Chicago] Reading From a Directory

[Dan Krol]

Lots of fundamental things are outsourced. Heck, think about sys.exit().
It's an interface to the OS, not a part of the language, so it makes sense.

On Mon, May 9, 2011 at 7:01 PM, Clyde Forrester <clydeforrester at gmail.com>wrote:

> Sean Brant wrote:
>
>> On May 9, 2011, at 6:32 PM, Clyde Forrester wrote:
>>
>>  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.
>>>
>>
>> If you just need to list the files in a directory do os.listdir [1]. If
>> need Unix style shell matching use the glob module [2].
>>
>> [1] http://docs.python.org/library/os.html#os.listdir
>> [2] http://docs.python.org/library/glob.html
>>
>>  c4
>>>
>>
> Thank you, Sean, Dan, JongMan, Dan, Mike, and Carl.
>
> It seems that os.listdir and glob are, in fact, the properly Pythonic ways
> of going about it. Outsourcing something that fundamental to a shell or
> module still bugs me, but I think I have to adapt my way of thinking to the
> more pragmatic viewpoint.
>
> As Carl pointed out:
>
>
>  My guess is you want the list of files in a dir, and don't care how
>> that happens.
>>
>
> Again, thank you.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Chicago mailing list
> Chicago at python.org
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/chicago
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/chicago/attachments/20110509/c6214204/attachment.html>