One of the most common things you can do with a Node is use it to print the file name that the node represents. Keep in mind, though, that because the object returned by a builder call is a list of Nodes, you must use Python subscripts to fetch individual Nodes from the list. For example, the following SConstruct file:

object_list = Object('hello.c')
program_list = Program(object_list)
print("The object file is: %s"%object_list[0])
print("The program file is: %s"%program_list[0])
      

Would print the following file names on a POSIX system:

% scons -Q
The object file is: hello.o
The program file is: hello
cc -o hello.o -c hello.c
cc -o hello hello.o

And the following file names on a Windows system:

C:\>scons -Q
The object file is: hello.obj
The program file is: hello.exe
cl /Fohello.obj /c hello.c /nologo
link /nologo /OUT:hello.exe hello.obj
embedManifestExeCheck(target, source, env)

Note that in the above example, the object_list[0] extracts an actual Node object from the list, and the Python print statement converts the object to a string for printing.