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5.4. Standard Module posixpath

This module implements some useful functions on POSIX pathnames.

basename (p) -- function of module posixpath
Return the base name of pathname p. This is the second half of the pair returned by posixpath.split(p).
commonprefix (list) -- function of module posixpath
Return the longest string that is a prefix of all strings in list. If list is empty, return the empty string ('').
exists (p) -- function of module posixpath
Return true if p refers to an existing path.
expanduser (p) -- function of module posixpath
Return the argument with an initial component of `~' or `~user' replaced by that user's home directory. An initial `~' is replaced by the environment variable $HOME; an initial `~user' is looked up in the password directory through the built-in module pwd. If the expansion fails, or if the path does not begin with a tilde, the path is returned unchanged.
expandvars (p) -- function of module posixpath
Return the argument with environment variables expanded. Substrings of the form `$name' or `${name}' are replaced by the value of environment variable name. Malformed variable names and references to non-existing variables are left unchanged.
isabs (p) -- function of module posixpath
Return true if p is an absolute pathname (begins with a slash).
isfile (p) -- function of module posixpath
Return true if p is an existing regular file. This follows symbolic links, so both islink() and isfile() can be true for the same path.
isdir (p) -- function of module posixpath
Return true if p is an existing directory. This follows symbolic links, so both islink() and isdir() can be true for the same path.
islink (p) -- function of module posixpath
Return true if p refers to a directory entry that is a symbolic link. Always false if symbolic links are not supported.
ismount (p) -- function of module posixpath
Return true if p is a mount point. (This currently checks whether p/.. is on a different device from p or whether p/.. and p point to the same i-node on the same device --- is this test correct for all UNIX and POSIX variants?)
join (p, q) -- function of module posixpath
Join the paths p and q intelligently: If q is an absolute path, the return value is q. Otherwise, the concatenation of p and q is returned, with a slash ('/') inserted unless p is empty or ends in a slash.
normcase (p) -- function of module posixpath
Normalize the case of a pathname. This returns the path unchanged; however, a similar function in macpath converts upper case to lower case.
samefile (p, q) -- function of module posixpath
Return true if both pathname arguments refer to the same file or directory (as indicated by device number and i-node number). Raise an exception if a stat call on either pathname fails.
split (p) -- function of module posixpath
Split the pathname p in a pair (head, tail), where tail is the last pathname component and head is everything leading up to that. If p ends in a slash (except if it is the root), the trailing slash is removed and the operation applied to the result; otherwise, join(head, tail) equals p. The tail part never contains a slash. Some boundary cases: if p is the root, head equals p and tail is empty; if p is empty, both head and tail are empty; if p contains no slash, head is empty and tail equals p.
splitext (p) -- function of module posixpath
Split the pathname p in a pair (root, ext) such that root + ext == p, the last component of root contains no periods, and ext is empty or begins with a period.
walk (p, visit, arg) -- function of module posixpath
Calls the function visit with arguments (arg, dirname, names) for each directory in the directory tree rooted at p (including p itself, if it is a directory). The argument dirname specifies the visited directory, the argument names lists the files in the directory (gotten from posix.listdir(dirname)). The visit function may modify names to influence the set of directories visited below dirname, e.g., to avoid visiting certain parts of the tree. (The object referred to by names must be modified in place, using del or slice assignment.)