> But it obviously does a lot of other stuff, including formatting > the results of the system call for display.
It most decisively does *not* format the results of the system call "for display". Instead, it converts the C data type holding the stat result into a Python data type. That data type historically was a tuple, but now is struct-like type with the same fields as the C data type. It's the same as saying "+ does not do addition. It does a lot of other stuff, including the formatting of the result of the operation for display". > Since what it really > at issue here is presentation of the results, I'd say that the > stat system call and the stat program wrapping it are very > different things. This is probably a matter of opinion. I think it is important to understand that Python does *not* do any significant code to os.stat and os.lstat; entirely unlike libraries in other languages that attempt to also change the programming API in the process of wrapping the system API. Regards, Martin -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
