Chapter 4. Managing Files

As with any well-developed scripting language, Python is very prepared to handle the need to directly manage and manipulate files. Python includes several built-in functions, as well as additional modules to help manage files. These functions and modules provide the versatility and power to handle file parsing, data storage and retrieval, and filesystem management, as well as archive management.

It's not possible to adequately address all the file management features of Python in this book; however, this chapter will provide the most common phrases to create and use files, manage files on a file system, and archive files for storage or distribution.