strncmp in python

Yes. You can do: if a in b: That will check if a is a substring anywhere in b.

e.g.

if 'foo' in 'foobar':
    print True

if 'foo' in 'barfoo':
    print True

From your post, it appears you want to only look at the start of the strings. In that case, you can use the .startswith method:

if 'foobar'.startswith('foo'):
    print "it does!"

Similarly, you can do the same thing with endswith:

if 'foobar'.endswith('bar'):
    print "Yes sir :)"

finally, maybe the most literal translation of strncmp would be to use slicing and ==:

if a[:n] == b[:n]:
    print 'strncmp success!'

Python also has many facilities for dealing with path names in the os.path module. It’s worth investigating what is in there. There are some pretty neat functions.