if it might be outside the platform defaultand you should rely on the default unicode api for file names in most cases againsee python' manuals for more on the unicode file name story than we have space to cover fully hereand see learning pythonfourth editionfor more on unicode in general in we're going to put the tools we met in this to realistic use for examplewe'll apply file and directory tools to implement file splitterstesting systemsdirectory copies and comparesand variety of utilities based on tree walking we'll find that python' directory tools we met here have an enabling quality that allows us to automate large set of real-world tasks firstthough concludes our basic tool surveyby exploring another system topic that tends to weave its way into wide variety of application domains--parallel processing in python directory tools