[Python-ideas] chdir context manager (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Sat Jan 19 18🔞18 CET 2013

On Sat, Jan 19, 2013 at 6:57 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

-1 from me

I consider caring about the current directory to be an anti-pattern - paths should be converted to absolute ASAP, and for invocation of other tools that care about the current directory, that's why the subprocess APIs accept a "cwd" argument. I certainly don't want to encourage people to unnecessarily rely on global state by providing a standard library context manager that makes it easier to do so.

Also it's not thread-safe.

TBH I think if people are doing this today it's probably a good idea to suggest that they make their code more reliable by turning it into a context manager; but I think having that context manager in the stdlib is encouraging dubious practices. (The recommendation to use absolute filenames is a good one but not always easy to implement given a large codebase relying on the current directory.)

-- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)

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