Question

I want to make a script that will take a file, strip off the last byte of a file. The file can be anything, not just text.

I have been playing around with the seek() and tell() methods, but I can’t find a way of dealing with the file that allows me to do this.

I figured it should be relatively trivial, but perhaps Python is not an appropriate tool for this?

fileStripped = file[:-4]
newpath = path + "\\" + fileStripped 
if not os.path.exists(newpath): 
 os.makedirs(newpath)
with open(fname, "r") as f:
 f.seek (0, 2)           # Seek @ EOF
 fsize = f.tell()        # Get Size
 f=f.read
 f=f[:fsize-2]

This method errors, and tells me I can not subscript the f=f[:fsize-2] line

Answer 1

Use shutil.copyfileobj to copy the file and then remove the last byte by seeking back one byte and truncating the file:

with open(srcfile, 'r') as fsrc:
    with open(destfile, 'w+') as fdest:
        shutil.copyfileobj(fsrc, fdest)
        fdest.seek(-1, os.SEEK_END)
        fdest.truncate()