How can I get user input from stdin allowing directory navigation?

Question

I want to ask the user to provide a file location from stdin.

How can I allow the user to navigate through the directory structure while typing? Things like tab for completing directory names...

raw_input is unaware of the environment.

Answer 1

There is nothing I'm aware of in python that can out of the box accomplish what you seek. But you could fairly easily write such a thing using python's cmd module -- http://docs.python.org/2/library/cmd.html#module-cmd

It supports tab completion -- which gives you the option to write code that gets executed each time someone presses a key (or presses the tab key).

The python cmd module is basically a wrapper around the lower level gnu readline system (http://docs.python.org/2/library/readline.html#module-readline), so you could probably write what you want using just that system -- but the cmd modules has quite a bit of functionality that makes what you are trying to accomplish simpler.