Programming Python, 3rd Edition

7.1. "The Greps of Wrath" This chapter continues our exploration of systems programming case studies. Here, the focus is on Python scripts that perform more advanced kinds of file and directory processing. The examples in this chapter do system-le...

7.2. Fixing DOS Line Ends When I wrote the first edition of this book, I shipped two copies of every example file on the CD-ROMone with Unix line-end markers and one with DOS markers. The idea was that this would make it easy to view and edit the ...

7.3. Fixing DOS Filenames The heart of the prior script was findFiles, a function that knows how to portably collect matching file and directory names in an entire tree, given a list of filename patterns. It doesn't do much more...

7.4. Searching Directory Trees Engineers love to change things. As I was writing this book, I found it almost irresistible to move and rename directories, variables, and shared modules in the book examples tree whenever I thought ...

7.5. Visitor: Walking Trees Generically Armed with the portable search_all script from Example 7-10, I was able to better pinpoint files to be edited every time I changed the book examples tree structure. At least initially, in on...

7.6. Copying Directory Trees The next three sections conclude this chapter by exploring a handful of additional utilities for processing directories (a.k.a. folders) on your computer with Python. They present directory copy, deletion, and com...

7.7. Deleting Directory Trees Both of the copy scripts in the last section work as planned, but they aren't very forgiving of existing directory trees. That is, they implicitly assume that the "to" target directory either is empty or doesn't exist...

7.8. Comparing Directory Trees Engineers can be a paranoid sort (but you didn't hear that from me). At least I am. It comes from decades of seeing things go terribly wrong, I suppose. When I create a CD backup of my hard drive, for instanc...