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 modelled 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.
Queue A synchronized queue class.
anydbm Generic interface to DBM-style database modules.
dumbdbm Portable implementation of the simple DBM interface.
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
zlib Low-level interface to compression and decompression routines compatible with gzip.
gzip Interfaces for gzip compression and decompression using file objects.
rlcompleter Python identifier completion in the readline library.


Send comments on this document to python-docs@python.org.