Working with files and directories

When it comes to files and directories, Python offers plenty of useful tools. In particular, in the following examples, we will leverage the os, pathlib, and shutil modules. As we'll be reading and writing on the disk, we will be using a file, fear.txt, which contains an excerpt from Fear, by Thich Nhat Hanh, as a guinea pig for some of our examples.

Opening files

Opening a file in Python is very simple and intuitive. In fact, we just need to use the open() function. Let's see a quick example:

# files/open_try.py
fh = open('fear.txt', 'rt')  # r: read, t: text
for line in fh.readlines():
    print(line.strip())  # remove whitespace and print
fh.close()

The previous code is very simple. We call open(), passing the filename, and telling open() that we want to read it in text mode. There is no path information before the filename...