Whole document tree
6. Generic Operating System Services
The modules described in this chapter provide interfaces to operating system features that are available on (almost) all operating systems, such as files and a clock. The interfaces are generally modeled after the Unix or C interfaces, but they are available on most other systems as well. Here's an overview:
| os | Miscellaneous OS interfaces. |
| os.path | Common pathname manipulations. |
| dircache | Return directory listing, with cache mechanism. |
| stat | Utilities for interpreting the results of os.stat(), os.lstat() and os.fstat(). |
| statcache | Stat files, and remember results. |
| statvfs | Constants for interpreting the result of os.statvfs(). |
| filecmp | Compare files efficiently. |
| popen2 | Subprocesses with accessible standard I/O streams. |
| time | Time access and conversions. |
| sched | General purpose event scheduler. |
| mutex | Lock and queue for mutual exclusion. |
| getpass | Portable reading of passwords and retrieval of the userid. |
| curses | An interface to the curses library, providing portable terminal handling. |
| curses.textpad | Emacs-like input editing in a curses window. |
| curses.wrapper | Terminal configuration wrapper for curses programs. |
| curses.ascii | Constants and set-membership functions for ASCII characters. |
| curses.panel | A panel stack extension that adds depth to curses windows. |
| getopt | Portable parser for command line options; support both short and long option names. |
| tempfile | Generate temporary file names. |
| errno | Standard errno system symbols. |
| glob | Unix shell style pathname pattern expansion. |
| fnmatch | Unix shell style filename pattern matching. |
| shutil | High-level file operations, including copying. |
| locale | Internationalization services. |
| gettext | Multilingual internationalization services. |
 |
 |
 |
Python Library Reference |  |
 |
 |
Release 2.1.3, documentation updated on April 8, 2002.