how to change user's shell current directory using python ? (ubuntu/linux)

Question

We can change the current directory in the shell:

username@hostname:~/f1$ cd ~/f2
username@hostname:~/f2$ 

is it possible to write a python (v2.7 and / or v3) which changes the current directory to one programatically determined?

Eg

username@hostname:~/f1$ python change_dir.py
username@hostname:~/f2$ 

Answer 1

As chepner and Sraw correctly said, a child process cannot change the current directory of its parent. So, what you can do is to let the Python program output the desired directory and use this output in a cd command:

cd `python print_dir.py`

Answer 2

Maybe you mean something like this:

import os
os.chdir(os.path.join(os.path.dirname(os.getcwd()), 'f2'))