[Skip Montanaro]
Well, we could confuse everyone and rename "chmod" to "chfat" ...
I don't want to rename anything, nor do I want to use MS-specific names. chmod is both the wrong spelling & the wrong functionality for all non-Unix systems. os.path did a Good Thing by, e.g., introducing getmtime(), despite that everyone knows <wink> it's just os.stat()[8]. New isreadonly(path) and setreadonly(path) are more what I'm after; nothing beyond that is portable, & never will be.
Windows probably has an equivalent function whose name is 17 characters long
Indeed, SetFileAttributes is exactly 17 characters long (you moonlighting on NT, Skip?!). But while Windows geeks would like to use that, it's both the wrong spelling & the wrong functionality for all non-Windows systems.
... Hasn't Guido's position been that the interface modules like os, posix, etc are just a thin layer over the underlying API (Guido: note how I cleverly attributed this position to you but also placed the responsibility for correctness on your head!)? If that's the case, perhaps we should provide a slightly higher level module that abstracts the file system as objects, and adopts a more user-friendly approach to the secret octal codes.
Like that, yes.
Those of us worried about job security could continue to use the lower level module and leave the higher level interface for former Visual Basic programmers.
You're just *begging* Guido to make the Python2 os module take all of its names from the Win32 API <wink>. it's-no-lamer-to-be-ignorant-of-unix-names-than-it-is- to-be-ignorant-of-chinese-ly y'rs - tim