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 should mention I'm running it under a *nix environment.

Answer 1

My solution using the tempfile module:

import tempfile
import errno

def isWritable(path):
    try:
        testfile = tempfile.TemporaryFile(dir = path)
        testfile.close()
    except OSError as e:
        if e.errno == errno.EACCES:  # 13
            return False
        e.filename = path
        raise
    return True

Answer 2

If you only care about the file perms, os.access(path, os.W_OK) should do what you ask for. If you instead want to know whether you can write to the directory, open() a test file for writing (it shouldn't exist beforehand), catch and examine any IOError, and clean up the test file afterwards.

More generally, to avoid TOCTOU attacks (only a problem if your script runs with elevated privileges -- suid or cgi or so), you shouldn't really trust these ahead-of-time tests, but drop privs, do the open(), and expect the IOError.

Answer 3

Although what Christophe suggested is a more Pythonic solution, the os module does have the os.access function to check access:

os.access('/path/to/folder', os.W_OK) # W_OK is for writing, R_OK for reading, etc.

Answer 4

Here is something I created based on ChristopheD's answer:

import os

def isWritable(directory):
    try:
        tmp_prefix = "write_tester";
        count = 0
        filename = os.path.join(directory, tmp_prefix)
        while(os.path.exists(filename)):
            filename = "{}.{}".format(os.path.join(directory, tmp_prefix),count)
            count = count + 1
        f = open(filename,"w")
        f.close()
        os.remove(filename)
        return True
    except Exception as e:
        #print "{}".format(e)
        return False

directory = "c:\\"
if (isWritable(directory)):
    print "directory is writable"
else:
    print "directory is not writable"