pathext

pathext is a collection of functions working with pathlib.Path. They're often wrappers for standard library functionality with some extensions.

Executable lookup

pathext.which()

Wrapper for shutil.which() which returns the result as an absolute Path (or None if it fails to find the executable). It also has a couple extra features, see below.

Arguments (all of them except name are optional):

• name: str - Executable name to look up.
• path: None | str | Sequence[Path] - Directory list to look up name in. If set to None, or set to a string, then it is passed to shutil.which() as-is. If set to a list, concatenates the list items using os.pathsep, and passes the result to shutil.which(). Defaults to None. See shutil.which()'s documentation on exact behaviour of this argument.
• cwd: Optional[Path] - If specified, then changes the current working directory to cwd for the duration of the shutil.which() call. Note that since it is changing global state (the current working directory), it is inherently not thread-safe.

pathext.checked_which()

Same as pathext.which(), except it raises ValueError instead of returning None if it cannot find the executable.

Manipulating PATH strings

pathext.split_path_list()

Split PATH string based on os.pathsep and convert each component to pathlib.Path.

Empty components will be removed, i.e. leading, trailing or duplicated separators will not cause issues.

In contrast to str.split(), if the string is empty, the function will return an empty list.

pathext.join_path_list()

Create PATH string (os.pathsep-separated string) from list of paths. The list is allowed to contain Path objects, strings and even None. Empty strings and Nones will be removed before joining the list.

pathext.deduplicate_path_list()

Remove duplicates from path list, keeping only the first occurence. The list is allowed to contain Path objects, strings and even None. Empty strings and Nones will be removed before deduplication, and the rest is converted to Path.

Generic utilities

pathext.to_path()

Simple function that converts a str to a Path (just like Path's constructor), but also handles None by returning None. It can be used to convert the return value of functions that return str | None to Path | None.

pathext.temporary_directory()

Context manager similar to tempfile.TemporaryDirectory except it returns the created directory's name as an absolute pathlib.Path instead of str.

Supports all arguments of tempfile.TemporaryDirectory, including delete introduced in Python 3.12. If delete is specified on Python 3.11 or older, ValueError is raised.

Note that the returned path is always absolute, even if the dir parameter is relative. This is consistent with how tempfile.TemporaryDirectory works starting with Python 3.12.

pathext.chdir_context()

Non parallel-safe context manager to change the current working directory. If path is None, it does nothing. If path is not None, it changes the current working directory upon entering and restores the old one on exit.

Unlike contextlib.chdir(), this context manager is NOT reentrant or reusable.

See contextlib.chdir()'s documentation on notes about threaded and async contexts.