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<#15615#><#15615#> 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. |