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 operating system 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. |
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Python Library Reference |  |
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Release 2.2, documentation updated on December 21, 2001.