Check if directory paths are the same

Question

I need to evaluate whether 2 strings refer to the same directory or not (doing a simple comparison is not good enough due to possible virtual links, etc...)

I have looked into filecmp, but filecmp.cmp seems to work only for files, not directories. filecmp.dircmp does not seem to exactly fit my purpose.

Therefore, I am currently doing it this way:

if os.path.realpath(old_path) == os.path.realpath(new_path):
    raise ValueError('Need different path!')

Does anyone have a better idea? Is there any edge case in which this would not work?

Answer 1

The function os.path.samefile can be used as it also works on directories. e.g. os.path.samefile(old_path, new_path)

See docs: https://docs.python.org/3/library/os.path.html#os.path.samefile