This seems to be an application-level decision. If so, in your application, why not just check to see if the file exists, and implement whatever workaround you deem correct for your needs? For example (to choose a simple, but rather silly, file naming strategy):
fname = "x" while os.path.exists(fname): fname = "%s.%f" % (fname, random.random()) fd = open(fname, "w") It's clearly not going to be safe from race conditions, but I leave solving that problem as an exercise for the reader. Skip -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list