The os module supports many functions that allow you to affect the file system. I will mention only a few of them, as many of them are actually a bit dangerous to use (you can easily delete files that you wanted to keep) and you do not need them anyway. If you are really interested in manipulating the file system, you can read up on the dozens of other functions that os supports.

getcwd()

getcwd() returns the current working directory as a string.

from os import getcwd
print( getcwd() )

chdir()

chdir() changes the current working directory. The new directory is provided as a string argument.

from os import getcwd, chdir

home = getcwd()
print( home )
chdir( ".." )
print( getcwd() )
chdir( home )
print( getcwd() )

listdir()

listdir() returns a list of all the files and directories in the directory that is given as argument. The names are given in arbitrary order. Notice that they do not include the full path name.

from os import listdir

flist = listdir( "." )
for name in flist:
    print( name )

system()

system() gets a string argument that is a command, that Python executes on the command line. You can use it to do anything that the operating system supports, including running other programs. There are better ways to execute other programs, though (look for functions that start with “exec”).