Determining Whether a Directory is Writeable

Question

What would be the best way in Python to determine whether a directory is writeable for the user executing the script? Since this will likely involve using the os module I sh

Answer 1

I ran into this same need while adding an argument via argparse. The built in type=FileType('w') wouldn't work for me as I was looking for a directory. I ended up writing my own method to solve my problem. Here is the result with argparse snippet.

#! /usr/bin/env python
import os
import argparse

def writable_dir(dir):
    if os.access(dir, os.W_OK) and os.path.isdir(dir):
        return os.path.abspath(dir)
    else:
        raise argparse.ArgumentTypeError(dir + " is not writable or does not exist.")

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument("-d","--dir", type=writable_dir(), default='/tmp/',
    help="Directory to use. Default: /tmp")
opts = parser.parse_args()

That results in the following:

$ python dir-test.py -h
usage: dir-test.py [-h] [-d DIR]

optional arguments:
  -h, --help         show this help message and exit
  -d DIR, --dir DIR  Directory to use. Default: /tmp

$ python dir-test.py -d /not/real
usage: dir-test.py [-h] [-d DIR]
dir-test.py: error: argument -d/--dir: /not/real is not writable or does not exist.

$ python dir-test.py -d ~

I went back and added print opts.dir to the end, and everything appears to be functioning as desired.