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

Petri Lehtinen petri at digip.org
Thu May 26 08:09:04 CEST 2011

Nick Coghlan wrote:

2011/5/26 Charles-François Natali <neologix at free.fr>: > 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

Rather than a fixed binary flag, I would suggest following the precedent of copytree and rmtree, and provide recursive functionality as a separate shutil function (i.e. shutil.chmodtree, shutil.chowntree).

+1

As noted, while these can be written manually, it is convenient to have the logic for handling symlinks dealt with for you, as well as not having to look up the particular incantation for correctly linking os.walk and the relevant operations.

This is exactly what I meant when saying that the -R option to chown and chmod shell commands is useful. I could do it without them, but writing the same logic every time with error handling would be cumbersome.

Petri

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