no room for further exploration herethoughwe'll have to be satisfied with the fact that our exception handler sidesteps the printing problem altogether you should still be aware of the implications of unicode filename decodingthoughon some platforms you may need to pass byte strings to os walk in this script to prevent decoding errors as filenames are created since unicode is still relatively new in be sure to test for such errors on your computer and your python also see also python' manuals for more on the treatment of unicode filenamesand the text learning python for more on unicode in general as noted earlierour scripts also had to open text files in binary mode because some might contain undecodable content too it might seem surprising that unicode issues can crop up in basic printing like this toobut such is life in the brave new unicode world many real-world scripts don' need to care much about unicodeof course--including those we'll explore in the next section splitting and joining files like most kidsmine spent lot of time on the internet when they were growing up as far as could tellit was the thing to do among their generationcomputer geeks and gurus seem to have been held in the same sort of esteem that my generation once held rock stars when kids disappeared into their roomschances were good that they were hacking on computersnot mastering guitar riffs (wellreal onesat leastit may or may not be healthier than some of the diversions of my own misspent youthbut that' topic for another kind of book despite the rhetoric of techno-pundits about the web' potential to empower an upcoming generation in ways unimaginable by their predecessorsmy kids seemed to spend most of their time playing games to fetch new ones in my house at the timethey had to download to shared computer which had internet access and transfer those games to their own computers to install (their own machines did not have internet access until laterfor reasons that most parents in the crowd could probably expand upon the problem with this scheme is that game files are not small they were usually much too big to fit on floppy or memory stick of the timeand burning cd or dvd took away valuable game-playing time if all the machines in my house ran linuxthis would have been nonissue there are standard command-line programs on unix for chopping file into pieces small enough to fit on transfer device (split)and others for for related print issuesee ' workaround for program aborts when printing stack tracebacks to standard output from spawned programs unlike the problem described herethat issue does not appear to be related to unicode characters that may be unprintable in shell windows but reflects another regression for standard output prints in general in python which may or may not be repaired by the time you read this text see also the python environment variable pythonioencodingwhich can override the default encoding used for standard streams complete system programs