[Python-Dev] Extending os.chown() to accept user/group names (original) (raw)

Charles-François Natali neologix at free.fr
Wed May 25 20:45:24 CEST 2011

While we're at it, adding a "recursive" argument to this shutil.chown could also be useful. I don't like the idea of a recursive flag. I would prefer a "map-like" function to "apply" a function on all files of a directory. Something like shutil.applyrecursive(shutil.chown)...

I was also thinking about this possibility. The advantage is that we could factor-out the recursive walk logic to make it available for other functions (chown, chmod...). It doesn't map well to the Unix command, though.

You can do all of this with an appropriate application of os.walk().

Then, I wonder why shutil.copytree and shutil.rmtree are provided. Recursive rm/copy/chown/chmod are extremely useful in system administration scripts. Furthermore, it's not as simple as it seems because of symlinks, see for example http://bugs.python.org/issue4489 .

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