Why doesn't Python remember the initial directory?

[andrea crotti]

2012/8/20 Roy Smith <roy at panix.com>:
> In article <k0tf8g$adc$1 at news.albasani.net>,
>  Walter Hurry <walterhurry at lavabit.com> wrote:
>
>> It is difficult to think of a sensible use for os.chdir, IMHO.
>
> It is true that you can mostly avoid chdir() by building absolute
> pathnames, but it's often more convenient to just cd somewhere and use
> names relative to that.  Fabric (a very cool tool for writing remote
> sysadmin scripts), gives you a cd() command which is a context manager,
> making it extra convenient.
>
> Also, core files get created in the current directory.  Sometimes
> daemons will cd to some fixed location to make sure that if they dump
> core, it goes in the right place.
>
> On occasion, you run into (poorly designed, IMHO) utilities which insist
> of reading or writing a file in the current directory.  If you're
> invoking one of those, you may have no choice but to chdir() to the
> right place before running them.
> --
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list


I've done quite a lot of system programming as well, and changing
directory is only a source of possible troubles in general.

If I really have to for some reasons I do this


class TempCd:
    """Change temporarily the current directory
    """
    def __init__(self, newcwd):
        self.newcwd = newcwd
        self.oldcwd = getcwd()

    def __enter__(self):
        chdir(self.newcwd)
        return self

    def __exit__(self, type, value, traceback):
        chdir(self.oldcwd)


with TempCd('/tmp'):
    # now working in /tmp

# now in the original

So it's not that hard to avoid problems..