Printing a Node's name as described in the previous section works because the string representation of a Node object is the name of the file. If you want to do something other than print the name of the file, you can fetch it by using the built-in Python str function. For example, if you want to use the Python os.path.exists to figure out whether a file exists while the SConstruct file is being read and executed, you can fetch the string as follows:

import os.path
program_list = Program('hello.c')
program_name = str(program_list[0])
if not os.path.exists(program_name):
    print("%s does not exist!"%program_name)
      

Which executes as follows on a POSIX system:

% scons -Q
hello does not exist!
cc -o hello.o -c hello.c
cc -o hello hello.o