2012/8/20 Roy Smith <r...@panix.com>: > In article <k0tf8g$adc$1...@news.albasani.net>, > Walter Hurry <walterhu...@lavabit.com> wrote: > >> It is difficult to think of a sensible use for os.chdir, IMHO. > > It is true that you can mostly avoid chdir() by building absolute > pathnames, but it's often more convenient to just cd somewhere and use > names relative to that. Fabric (a very cool tool for writing remote > sysadmin scripts), gives you a cd() command which is a context manager, > making it extra convenient. > > Also, core files get created in the current directory. Sometimes > daemons will cd to some fixed location to make sure that if they dump > core, it goes in the right place. > > On occasion, you run into (poorly designed, IMHO) utilities which insist > of reading or writing a file in the current directory. If you're > invoking one of those, you may have no choice but to chdir() to the > right place before running them. > -- > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
I've done quite a lot of system programming as well, and changing directory is only a source of possible troubles in general. If I really have to for some reasons I do this class TempCd: """Change temporarily the current directory """ def __init__(self, newcwd): self.newcwd = newcwd self.oldcwd = getcwd() def __enter__(self): chdir(self.newcwd) return self def __exit__(self, type, value, traceback): chdir(self.oldcwd) with TempCd('/tmp'): # now working in /tmp # now in the original So it's not that hard to avoid problems.. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list