Twisted's filepath Module

Glyph recently blogged about some of the buried treasure in Twisted, the filepath module in particular. Since working at Divmod, I've made use of this module quite a bit, and thought I'd share some of the features that I've found most useful (and intuitively nice to use).

Assuming you've got Twisted installed, let's fire up a python interpreter and import the FilePath class and instantiate it with /tmp and test some basic operations:


Isn't that nice? I love not having to import and use the os.path.exists function; it's a method on the object representing a file or a path, as it should be. I also enjoy the convenience FilePath offers when it comes to creating paths:


We had to call restat() so that the object would check the file system again (since we just made some changes). Now, for some files:


And if you don't believe that, we can switch to shell:


Reading and writing operations are the same as usual:


But you can use shortcuts like this, too:


Let's get the path and recheck the file size, just to make sure:


Hmm... for some reason, I really like this file and want to keep it. What do I do?


That's it! Nice, eh? Of course, we're careful, so we check to make sure it happened:


To see more, check out the source, or at least do dir(FilePath) to see what other goodies this class has to offer, and enjoy :-)