[Tutor] Open a directory in the default file manager

Thomas Pani thomas.pani at gmail.com
Fri May 16 17:55:58 CEST 2008


Tim Michelsen wrote:
 > Hello,
 > is there any function/module that allows me to open a directory in the
 > default file manager of a operating system?

On Windows you can use os.startfile().
On "pure" Unices there's no such thing as filetype associations
However, if you use a desktop environment, you can spawn xdg-open (from 
xdg-utils) from Python. This will autodetect gnome, kde and xfce and use 
their tools (gnome-open, kfmclient, exo-open).
I think on OS X/Darwin there's a similar utility called `open'.

You can use sys.platform to determine which system you're running on.

thomas


More information about the Tutor mailing list