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.
subprocess   Subprocess management.
popen2   Subprocesses with accessible standard I/O streams.
datetime   Basic date and time types.
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.
optparse   More convenient, flexible, and powerful command-line parsing library.
tempfile   Generate temporary files and directories.
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.
logging   Logging module for Python based on PEP 282.
platform   Retrieves as much platform identifying data as possible.

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