Programming Python, Second Edition

The os Module

As mentioned, os contains all the usual operating-system calls you may have used in your C programs and shell scripts. Its calls deal with directories, processes, shell variables, and the like. Technically, this module provides POSIX tools -- a portable standard for operating-system calls -- along with platform-independent directory processing tools as nested module os.path. Operationally, os serves as a largely portable interface to your computer’s system calls: scripts written with os and os.path can usually be run on any platform unchanged.

In fact, if you read the os module’s source code, you’ll notice that it really just imports whatever platform-specific system module you have on your computer (e.g., nt, mac, posix). See the file os.py in the Python source library directory -- it simply runs a from* statement to copy all names out of a platform-specific module. By always importing os instead of platform-specific modules, though, your scripts are mostly immune to platform implementation differences.

The Big os Lists

Let’s take a quick look at the basic interfaces in os. If you inspect this module’s attributes interactively, you get a huge list of names that will vary per Python release, will likely vary per platform, and isn’t incredibly useful until you’ve learned what each name means:

>>> import os
>>> dir(os) ['F_OK', 'O_APPEND', 'O_BINARY', 'O_CREAT', 'O_EXCL', 'O_RDONLY', 'O_RDWR', 'O_TEXT', 'O_TRUNC', 'O_WRONLY', 'P_DETACH', 'P_NOWAIT', 'P_NOWAITO', 'P_OVERLAY', ...