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 OS 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.
popen2 Subprocesses with accessible standard I/O streams.
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.
tempfile Generate temporary file names.
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.

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