8. Unix Specific Services

The modules described in this chapter provide interfaces to features that are unique to the Unix operating system, or in some cases to some or many variants of it. Here's an overview:

posix

-- The most common POSIX system calls (normally used via module os).

posixpath

-- Common POSIX pathname manipulations (normally used via os.path).

pwd

-- The password database (getpwnam() and friends).

grp

-- The group database (getgrnam() and friends).

crypt

-- The crypt() function used to check Unix passwords.

dbm

-- The standard ``database'' interface, based on ndbm.

gdbm

-- GNU's reinterpretation of dbm.

termios

-- POSIX style tty control.

TERMIOS

-- The symbolic constants required to use the termios module.

fcntl

-- The fcntl() and ioctl() system calls.

posixfile

-- A file-like object with support for locking.

resource

-- An interface to provide resource usage information on the current process.

syslog

-- An interface to the Unix syslog library routines.

stat

-- Constants and functions for interpreting the results of os.stat(), os.lstat() and os.fstat().

commands

-- Wrapper functions for os.popen().