I was reading a post by Trey Hunner on why pathlib is great, where he makes the case that pathlib is a better choice than the standard library alternatives that preceded it. I wouldn't actually disagree with a word of it. He's entirely correct. You should probably be using pathlib were it fits.

Personally, however, I rarely use pathlib, because I find that for the most part, PyFilesystem is a better choice. I'd like to take some of the code examples from Trey's post and re-write them using PyFilesystem, just so we can compare.

The first example from Trey's post, creates a folder then moves a file into it. Here it is:

The code above is straightforward, and hides the gory platform details which is a major benefit of pathlib over os.path. continue reading…

I recently added a number of examples on working with files and directories with Python and PyFilesystem.

The first example, is count_py.py which recursively sums up the number of bytes stored in a directory, and renders it in a "friendly" format.

This script takes a path or a URL. For instance python3 count_py.py ~/projects will sum up the bytes of Python in your projects folder.

For me, this gives the following output:

This script accepts a path, but it will also work with any supported filesystem. So you could sum the bytes of Python in an archive or cloud server. continue reading…