Question

Let’s say I have the following code,

file1 = open("myfile","w")

#Write to file1...

#Open Second File
file2 = open("otherfile","w")

#Write to file2...

file1.close()

file1 = file2

file2.close()

Will this effectively result in all files being closed or will file1 still have an open file (otherfile) that can be written to still?

Answer 1

Yes. (To clarify, both file objects will be closed, and will not be able to be written to)
The variable names are just references to the underlying objects. When you call the close() method on an object, it accesses that object and executes that method. If you examine both objects afterwards, you can tell:

>>> file1
<closed file 'file2.txt', mode 'w' at 0x10045e930>
>>> file2
<closed file 'file2.txt', mode 'w' at 0x10045e930>
>>> 

Note that in this situation, you set file1 = file2 so they both refer to the same closed file object. If there are no more references to the original file1 object, that object will be garbage collected.