title: Quickly detect local network paths
body: <p>Does Python have a way to quickly detect the existence of a local network path?</p>
  
  <p>I have tried using <code>os.path.exists</code> and <code>urllib2.urlopen</code>. When the path does not exist, they take at least tens of seconds to detect if the path exists.</p>
  
  <p>Is it possible to reduce the time to less than ten seconds?</p>
  
  <p>This is my test code:</p>
  
  <pre><code># -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
  
  import os
  import sys
  from urllib2 import urlopen
  
  path = "file:////192.168.199.249/Users"
  try:
      urlopen(path, timeout=1)
      print "exist"
  except Exception, e:
      print "not exist"
  
  if os.path.exists(path):
      print "exist"
  else:
      print "not exist"
  </code></pre>