[Tim Daneliuk] > I have a program wherein I want one behavior when a file is > set as executable and a different behavior if it is not. Is > there a simple way to determine whether a given named file is > executable that does not resort to all the lowlevel ugliness > of os.stat() AND that is portable across Win32 and *nix?
I'm fairly certain the answer is no. What follows is a relatively low-level and certainly not portable discussion. The last couple of times this question came up on the list I looked into the implementation and experimented a bit but in short I would say that os.stat / os.access were near enough useless for determining executablility under Windows. That's not down to Python as such; it's simply passing back what the crt offers. Of course that raises the slightly wider issue of: should the Python libs do more than simply call the underlying crt especially when that's known to give, perhaps misleading results? But I'm in no position to answer that. I suggest that for Windows, you either use the PATHEXT env var and determine whether a given file ends with one of its components. Or -- and this depends on your definition of executable under Windows -- use the FindExecutable win32 API call (exposed in the win32api module of pywin32 and available via ctypes) which will return the "executable" for anything which has an association defined. So the "executable" for a Word doc is the winword.exe program. The "executable" for an .exe is itself. TJG -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
