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. |
| 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<#15575#><#15575#> characters. |
| 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. |