Fair enough, choosing the right tool for the job. On my own servers I can take care that the requires modules are installed and even use virtual envs for stable

Fair enough, choosing the right tool for the job. On my own servers I can take care that the requires modules are installed and even use virtual envs for stable library versioning. This is how we do Let's Encrypt renewal because I can use a Python library for Route53 authentication that works. Your first example could be solved with something like [os.chown(p, uid, gid) for p in pathlib.Path('.').rglob('*')] Obviously this is more verbose than chown but I think it's ok in a script.