Treading The Right Path - Python

You can specify a full path to the file as well:

>>> data = open("/tmp/snakeoil.txt")
>>>

You could write a Python program that accomplishes the same thing:

#!/usr/bin/python
# open file
data = open("snakeoil.txt")
# read file
dump = data.read()
print dump, "-- EOF -- EOF --"
# clean up
data.close()

And when you run this script, Python should return the contents of the file"snakeoil.txt", with a message at the end.

After years of research, scientists at AB Labs have come up with a radical
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and animals everywhere.
We call it Air In A Bottle(tm), and we firmly consider it to be one of our
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Carry it around with you (the bottle is titanium, the same material used in
rocket ships, and the air is, well, air) and inhale from it whenever you
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need air too!)
Air In A Bottle(tm). Get some today!
-- EOF -- EOF --

Notice that since this is being run as a script and not via thecommand-line interpreter, the \012s are automatically converted into linebreaks.

And look what happens if the file doesn't exist:

>>> data = open("/tmp/nosuchfile.txt")
Traceback (innermost last):
File "", line 1, in ?
IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/tmp/nosuchfile.txt'
>>>

>>> More Python Articles          >>> More By Vikram Vaswani, (c) Melonfire

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