Question

I’m building a basic file server and my program cannot find files.

def sendfile(sock, myfile):
    print 'Serving file:', myfile
    print 'File exists?:', os.path.exists(myfile)

    path = os.path.normpath(os.path.join(os.getcwd(), myfile))
    print 'Serving file:', path
    print 'File exists?:', os.path.exists(path)

These always return False even though the ‘myfile’ and ‘path’ are correct [the file is in the same directory as the server program].

IDLE works fine, but without passing to functions.

>>> print os.path.exists("/user/server/foo.txt")  
True

What have I missed?

[EDIT:] Output:

Serving file: foo.txt

File exists?: False
Serving file: /user/server/foo.txt

File exists?: False

Answer 1

I’m almost 100% sure you’re not sanitizing your input before you check if the path exists. Here’s something I ran in my interpreter:

>>> from os.path import exists
>>> exists('dog.png')
True
>>> exists('dog.png\n')
False

Try stripping whitespace on path before you check if it exists.