Moving up one directory in Python

Is there a simple way to move up one directory in python using a single line of code? Something similar to cd .. in command line

>>> import os
>>> print os.path.abspath(os.curdir)
C:\Python27
>>> os.chdir("..")
>>> print os.path.abspath(os.curdir)
C:\

Using os.chdir should work:

import os
os.chdir('..')

Obviously that os.chdir('..') is the right answer here. But just FYI, if in the future you come across situation when you have to extensively manipulate directories and paths, here is a great package (Unipath) which lets you treat them as Python objects: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Unipath

so that you could do something like this:

>>> from unipath import Path
>>> p = Path("/usr/lib/python2.5/gopherlib.py")
>>> p.parent
Path("/usr/lib/python2.5")
>>> p.name
Path("gopherlib.py")
>>> p.ext
'.py'

In Python 3.4 pathlib was introduced:

>>> from pathlib import Path
>>> p = Path('/etc/usr/lib')
>>> p
PosixPath('/etc/usr/lib')
>>> p.parent
PosixPath('/etc/usr')

It also comes with many other helpful features e.g. for joining paths using slashes or easily walking the directory tree.

For more information refer to the docs or this blog post, which covers the differences between os.path and pathlib.