Ian Bicking has inspired me to start keeping track of the little things in Python annoy me a little bit whenever I run into them. They don't really get in the way of development, but it would be nice if I didn't have to deal with them at all :) Maybe I'm just slow, but I didn't know about the os.statvfs() method until just yesterday. Up until then I've been parsing the output of 'df -k /mnt/drive' to find out how much free space a drive has! Of course, os.statvfs() is pretty much useless by itself. Try it out: import os os.statvfs(".") (4096, 4096, 19107656L, 2773425L, 1802799L, 9715712L, 8529635L, 8529635L, 0, 255) Great. What does that mean? Oh, I need the import the statvfs module to be able to usefully interpret this data. This module contains nothing other than a set of constants that index into the above tuple. So to get the free disk space, I would do something like: import os, statvfs s = os.statvfs(".") freebytes = s[statvfs.F_BSIZE] * s[statvfs.F_BAVAIL] Note that I'm not sure if statvfs.F_BSIZE or statvfs.F_FRSIZE is the proper entry to use. And the python documentation doesn't clear it up for me. There are really two things that bug me about this. The first is that the only reason for the statvfs module's existence is to make the os.statvfs() function useful. I would prefer that os.statvfs() returned a dictionary with meaningful keys, or an object with meaningful attributes. The stat module is another violator; it exists to make os.stat() useful. The second thing that bothers me is that I don't really think something like os.statvfs() is the best way to be calculating the free disk space in Python. Maybe I'll rant about this more in a future post, but functions and modules in Python that exactly mirror the underlying C library bug me. Sure, there may be times when you need access to the raw system call, but I can imagine that many people just want to know how much free space there is in a certain directory. Something along the lines of os.freespace(dir) would be a welcome addition to the standard library.