I know enhancements to pathlib gets brought up occasionally, but it doesn't
look like anyone has been willing to take the initiative and see things
through to completion. I am willing to keep the ball rolling here and even
implement these myself. I have some suggestions and I would like to
discuss them. I don't think any of them are significant enough to require
a pep. These can be split it into independent threads if anyone prefers.
1. copy
The big one people keep bringing up that I strongly agree on is a "copy"
method. This is really the only common file manipulation task that
currently isn't possible. You can make files, read them, move them, delete
them, create directories, even do less common operations like change owners
or create symlinks or hard links.
A common objection is that pathlib doesn't work on multiple paths. But
that isn't the case. There are a ton of methods that do that, including:
* symlink_to
* link_to
* rename
* replace
* glob
* rglob
* iterdir
* is_relative_to
* relative_to
* samefile
I think this is really the only common file operation that someone would
need to switch to a different module to do, and it seems pretty strange to
me to be able to make symbolic or hard links to a file but not straight up
copy one.
2. recursive remove
This could be a "recursive" option to "rmdir" or a "rmtree" method (I
prefer the option). The main reason for this is symmetry. It is possible
to create a tree of folders (using "mkdir(parents=True)"), but once you do
that you cannot remove it again in a straightforward way.
3. newLine for write_text
This is the only relevant option that "Path.open" has but "Path.write_text"
doesn't, and is a serious omission when dealing with multiple operating
systems.
4. uid and gid
You can get the owner and group name of a file (with the "owner" and
"group" methods), but there is no easy way to get the corresponding
number.
5. Stem with no suffixes
The stem property only takes off the last suffix, but even in the example
given ('my/library.tar.gz') it isn't really useful because the suffix has
two parts ('.tar' and '.gz'). I suggest another property, probably
called "rootstem"
or "basestem", that takes off all the suffixes, using the same logic as the
"suffixes" property. This is another symmetry issue: it is possible to
extract all the suffixes, but not remove them.
6. with_suffixes
Equivalent to with_suffix, but replacing all suffixes. Again, this is a
symmetry issue. It is hard to manipulate all the suffixes right now, as
the example show. You can add them or extract them, but not change them
without doing several steps.
7. exist_ok for is_* methods
Currently all the is_* methods (such as is_file) return False if the file
doesn't exist or if it is a broken symlink. This can be dangerous, since
it is not trivially easy to tell if you are dealing with the wrong type of
file vs. a missing file. And it isn't obvious behavior just from the
method name. I suggest adding an "exist_ok" argument to all of these, with
the default being "True" for backwards-compatibility. This argument name
is already in use elsewhere in pathlib. If this is False and the file is
not present, a "FileNotFoundError" is raised.
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