7. Optional Operating System Services

The modules described in this chapter provide interfaces to operating system features that are available on selected operating systems only. The interfaces are generally modeled after the Unix or C interfaces but they are available on some other systems as well (e.g. Windows or NT). Here's an overview:

signal   Set handlers for asynchronous events.
socket   Low-level networking interface.
select   Wait for I/O completion on multiple streams.
thread   Create multiple threads of control within one interpreter.
threading   Higher-level threading interface.
dummy_thread   Drop-in replacement for the thread module.
dummy_threading   Drop-in replacement for the threading module.
Queue   A synchronized queue class.
mmap   Interface to memory-mapped files for Unix and Windows.
anydbm   Generic interface to DBM-style database modules.
dbhash   DBM-style interface to the BSD database library.
whichdb   Guess which DBM-style module created a given database.
bsddb   Interface to Berkeley DB database library
dumbdbm   Portable implementation of the simple DBM interface.
zlib   Low-level interface to compression and decompression routines compatible with gzip.
gzip   Interfaces for gzip compression and decompression using file objects.
bz2   Interface to compression and decompression routines compatible with bzip2.
zipfile   Read and write ZIP-format archive files.
tarfile   Read and write tar-format archive files.
readline   GNU readline support for Python.
rlcompleter   Python identifier completion for the GNU readline library.

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