Moving up one directory in Python

Question

Is there a simple way to move up one directory in python using a single line of code  Something similar to cd    in command line

User · Answer

Well   I m not sure how portable os chdir       would actually be  Under Unix those are real filenames  I would prefer the following   import os os chdir os path dirname os getcwd       That gets the current working directory  steps up one directory  and then changes to that directory

User · Answer

Obviously that os chdir       is the right answer here  But just FYI  if in the future you come across situation when you have to extensively manipulate directories and paths  here is a great package  Unipath  which lets you treat them as Python objects  https   pypi python org pypi Unipath  so that you could do something like this    gt  gt  gt  from unipath import Path  gt  gt  gt  p   Path   usr lib python2 5 gopherlib py    gt  gt  gt  p parent Path   usr lib python2 5    gt  gt  gt  p name Path  gopherlib py    gt  gt  gt  p ext   py

User · Answer

In Python 3 4 pathlib was introduced    gt  gt  gt  from pathlib import Path  gt  gt  gt  p   Path   etc usr lib    gt  gt  gt  p PosixPath   etc usr lib    gt  gt  gt  p parent PosixPath   etc usr     It also comes with many other helpful features e g  for joining paths using slashes or easily walking the directory tree   For more information refer to the docs or this blog post  which covers the differences between os path and pathlib

User · Answer

Combine Kim s answer with os  p Path os getcwd    os chdir p parent

User · Answer

gt  gt  gt  import os  gt  gt  gt  print os path abspath os curdir  C  Python27  gt  gt  gt  os chdir        gt  gt  gt  print os path abspath os curdir  C

User · Answer

Use the os module   import os os chdir         should work

User · Answer

Although this is not exactly what OP meant as this is not super simple  however  when running scripts from Notepad   the os getcwd   method doesn t work as expected  This is what I would do   import os    get real current directory  determined by the file location  curDir      os path split os path abspath   file      print curDir    print current directory   Define a function like this   def dir up path n     here  path  is your path   n  is number of dirs up you want to go     for   in range n           path   dir up path rpartition       0   0    second argument equal  0  ensures that                                                            the function iterates proper number of times     return path    The use of this function is fairly simple - all you need is your path and number of directories up   print dir up curDir 3     print 3 directories above the current one   The only minus is that it doesn t stop on drive letter  it just will show you empty string

[python] Moving up one directory in Python

Examples related to python

Examples related to directory