6.1.6 Miscellanenous System Data
The follow data values are used to support path manipulation
operations. These are defined for all platforms.
Higher-level operations on pathnames are defined in the
os.path module.
- curdir
-
The constant string used by the OS to refer to the current directory,
e.g.
'.' for POSIX or ':' for the Macintosh.
- pardir
-
The constant string used by the OS to refer to the parent directory,
e.g.
'..' for POSIX or '::' for the Macintosh.
- sep
-
The character used by the OS to separate pathname components,
e.g. "/" for POSIX or ":" for the Macintosh.
Note that knowing this is not sufficient to be able to parse or
concatenate pathnames -- use os.path.split() and
os.path.join() -- but it is occasionally useful.
- altsep
-
An alternative character used by the OS to separate pathname components,
or
None if only one separator character exists. This is set to
"/" on DOS and Windows systems where sep is a backslash.
- pathsep
-
The character conventionally used by the OS to separate search patch
components (as in $PATH), e.g. ":" for POSIX or
";" for DOS and Windows.
- defpath
-
The default search path used by exec*p*() if the environment
doesn't have a
'PATH' key.
- linesep
-
The string used to separate (or, rather, terminate) lines on the
current platform. This may be a single character,
e.g.
'\n' for POSIX or '\r' for MacOS, or multiple
characters, e.g. '\r\n' for MS-DOS and MS Windows.
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