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
  • File Names, Command Line Arguments, and Environment Variables
  • Python UTF-8 Mode
  • Process Parameters
  • File Object Creation
  • File Descriptor Operations
    • Querying the size of a terminal
    • Inheritance of File Descriptors
  • Files and Directories
    • Timer File Descriptors
    • Linux extended attributes
  • Process Management
  • Interface to the scheduler
  • Miscellaneous System Information
  • Random numbers
• io — Core tools for working with streams
  • Overview
    • Text I/O
    • Binary I/O
    • Raw I/O
  • Text Encoding
    • Opt-in EncodingWarning
  • High-level Module Interface
  • Class hierarchy
    • I/O Base Classes
    • Raw File I/O
    • Buffered Streams
    • Text I/O
  • Performance
    • Binary I/O
    • Text I/O
    • Multi-threading
    • Reentrancy
• time — Time access and conversions
  • Functions
  • Clock ID Constants
  • Timezone Constants
• logging — Logging facility for Python