More bytes vs. strings documentation.
diff --git a/Doc/library/functions.rst b/Doc/library/functions.rst
index 1fdbeec..7fe9258 100644
--- a/Doc/library/functions.rst
+++ b/Doc/library/functions.rst
@@ -710,10 +710,11 @@
Open a file. If the file cannot be opened, :exc:`IOError` is raised.
- *file* is either a string giving the name (and the path if the file isn't in
- the current working directory) of the file to be opened or an integer file
- descriptor of the file to be wrapped. (If a file descriptor is given, it is
- closed when the returned I/O object is closed, unless *closefd* is set to
+ *file* is either a string or bytes object giving the name (and the
+ path if the file isn't in the current working directory) of the
+ file to be opened or an integer file descriptor of the file to be
+ wrapped. (If a file descriptor is given, it is closed when the
+ returned I/O object is closed, unless *closefd* is set to
``False``.)
*mode* is an optional string that specifies the mode in which the file is
diff --git a/Doc/library/os.path.rst b/Doc/library/os.path.rst
index 9bf5ae7..71eeb53 100644
--- a/Doc/library/os.path.rst
+++ b/Doc/library/os.path.rst
@@ -10,7 +10,14 @@
This module implements some useful functions on pathnames. To read or
write files see :func:`open`, and for accessing the filesystem see the
-:mod:`os` module.
+:mod:`os` module. The path parameters can be passed as either strings,
+or bytes. Applications are encouraged to represent file names as
+(Unicode) character strings. Unfortunately, some file names may not be
+representable as strings on Unix, so applications that need to support
+arbitrary file names on Unix should use bytes objects to represent
+path names. Vice versa, using bytes objects cannot represent all file
+names on Windows (in the standard ``mbcs`` encoding), hence Windows
+applications should use string objects to access all files.
.. warning::
diff --git a/Doc/library/os.rst b/Doc/library/os.rst
index 0fd4094..14ad8f9 100644
--- a/Doc/library/os.rst
+++ b/Doc/library/os.rst
@@ -694,6 +694,8 @@
.. function:: getcwd()
Return a string representing the current working directory.
+ May raise UnicodeDecodeError if the current directory path fails
+ to decode in the file system encoding.
Availability: Unix, Windows.