Bitwise operation and usage

Question

Consider this code:

x = 1        # 0001
x << 2       # Shift left 2 bits: 0100
# Result: 4

x | 2        # Bitwise OR: 0011
# Result: 3

x & 1              


        

Answer 1

Another common use-case is manipulating/testing file permissions. See the Python stat module: http://docs.python.org/library/stat.html.

For example, to compare a file's permissions to a desired permission set, you could do something like:

import os
import stat

#Get the actual mode of a file
mode = os.stat('file.txt').st_mode

#File should be a regular file, readable and writable by its owner
#Each permission value has a single 'on' bit.  Use bitwise or to combine 
#them.
desired_mode = stat.S_IFREG|stat.S_IRUSR|stat.S_IWUSR

#check for exact match:
mode == desired_mode
#check for at least one bit matching:
bool(mode & desired_mode)
#check for at least one bit 'on' in one, and not in the other:
bool(mode ^ desired_mode)
#check that all bits from desired_mode are set in mode, but I don't care about 
# other bits.
not bool((mode^desired_mode)&desired_mode)

I cast the results as booleans, because I only care about the truth or falsehood, but it would be a worthwhile exercise to print out the bin() values for each one.