Is It A Directory

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

When doing recursive directory traversal, sometimes you want to follow
symlinks that point at other directories, and sometimes you don’t. Here’s a
routine that you can use to check whether a path specifies a directory, with
the option to treat a symlink to a directory as a directory, or not:

import os
import stat

def isdir(path, followsymlink) :
"""returns true iff path specifies a directory. A symlink is followed
iff followsymlink."""
return stat.S_ISDIR((os.lstat, os.stat)[followsymlink](path).st_mode)
#end isdir