[Python-Dev] os.path.dirname misleading?

[Kevin Altis]

> From: Guido van Rossum
>
> > I'm not sure whether to classify this as a bug or a feature request.
> > Recently, I got burned by the fact that despite the name, dirname()
> > does not return the expected directory portion of a path if you pass
> > it a directory, instead it will return the parent directory because
> > it uses split.
>
> This is the first time I've ever heard of this confusion.  dirname is
> named after the Unix shell function of the same name, which behaves
> the same way.

Well that's news. I never heard of or used dirname in the shell. But with
that historical context it makes more sense now.

> I'm not even sure I understand what you expected -- you expected
> dirname("foo") to return "foo" if foo is a directory?  What would be
> the point of that?

Yes, I expected to get the directory passed in based on the function name.
In the code in question I don't know whether the path is a directory or a
file when I call dirname. I was simply misled by the function name. Looking
at this further I can see that I'm just going to have to create my own
directory(path) function because of how os.path.split behaves which impacts
dirname, I definitely need an isdir() check.

>>> os.path.split('c:\\mypython\\bugs\\')
('c:\\mypython\\bugs', '')
>>> os.path.split('c:\\mypython\\bugs')
('c:\\mypython', 'bugs')

Hmm, I may actually switch to using split(path)[0] and split(path)[-1] (or
split(path)[1]) in some cases since those might be more descriptive of what
dirname and basename actually do. Pity the functions aren't named
os.path.head and os.path.tail.

Sorry for the confusion,

ka