I agree that this has been a bit of a wart for a long time.While the old “let’s treat strings as paths” modules are split up like you said, pathlib can do what they do and more: https://docs.python.org/3/library/pathlib.html Exactly -- this is The Solution. It combines paths themselves with things you are likely to do with paths.It may well lack some nice features. If so, suggestions for that would be the way to go.