CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonwindowslinux
André Puel
André Puel

Reputation: 9179

Finding out if the current filesystem supports symbolic links

I am making a python script that in the case of EXT filesystem, will create symbolic links of some stuff, otherwise it will move the files.

How can I know the type of the filesystem of a directory?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 267

Answers (3)

ncoghlan
ncoghlan

Reputation: 41486

A variation on the accepted answer that checks if a particular directory is on a filesystem that supports symlinks (and handles cleaning up after itself):

import os, pathlib, tempfile

def supports_symlinks(target_dir) -> bool:
    with tempfile.TemporaryDirectory(dir=target_dir) as link_check_dir:
        link_check_path = pathlib.Path(link_check_dir)
        link_path = link_check_path / "src"
        try:
            os.symlink(link_path, "dest")
        except OSError:
            # Failed to create symlink under the target path
            return False
    # Successfully created a symlink under the target path
    return True

This is most useful when setting the symlink option on shutil.copytree rather than when making a single specific symlink.

Upvotes: 0

ardnew
ardnew

Reputation: 2086

some explicit code using @Joachim Isaksson's suggestion:

import os

try:
    os.symlink("src", "dest")
except OSError:
    print "cant do it :("

Upvotes: 4

Joachim Isaksson
Joachim Isaksson

Reputation: 180867

What you probably should do is to just try to make the link and if it fails, copy.

It'll give you the advantage that you'll automatically support all file systems with soft links without having to do advanced detection or keeping an updated list of supported file systems.

Upvotes: 4

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