6.1.6 Miscellaneous System Information
















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6.1.6 Miscellaneous System Information



confstr (name)

Return string-valued system configuration values.
name specifies the configuration value to retrieve; it may be a
string which is the name of a defined system value; these names are
specified in a number of standards (POSIX, Unix95, Unix98, and
others). Some platforms define additional names as well. The names
known to the host operating system are given in the
confstr_names dictionary. For configuration variables not
included in that mapping, passing an integer for name is also
accepted.
Availability: Unix.


If the configuration value specified by name isn't defined, the
empty string is returned.


If name is a string and is not known, ValueError is
raised. If a specific value for name is not supported by the
host system, even if it is included in confstr_names, an
OSError is raised with errno.EINVAL for the
error number.



confstr_names

Dictionary mapping names accepted by confstr() to the
integer values defined for those names by the host operating system.
This can be used to determine the set of names known to the system.
Availability: Unix.



sysconf (name)

Return integer-valued system configuration values.
If the configuration value specified by name isn't defined,
-1 is returned. The comments regarding the name
parameter for confstr() apply here as well; the dictionary
that provides information on the known names is given by
sysconf_names.
Availability: Unix.



sysconf_names

Dictionary mapping names accepted by sysconf() to the
integer values defined for those names by the host operating system.
This can be used to determine the set of names known to the system.
Availability: Unix.



The follow data values are used to support path manipulation
operations. These are defined for all platforms.


Higher-level operations on pathnames are defined in the
os.path module.


curdir

The constant string used by the OS to refer to the current directory,
e.g. '.' for POSIX or ':' for the Macintosh.



pardir

The constant string used by the OS to refer to the parent directory,
e.g. '..' for POSIX or '::' for the Macintosh.



sep

The character used by the OS to separate pathname components,
e.g. "/" for POSIX or ":" for the Macintosh.
Note that knowing this is not sufficient to be able to parse or
concatenate pathnames -- use os.path.split() and
os.path.join() -- but it is occasionally useful.



altsep

An alternative character used by the OS to separate pathname components,
or None if only one separator character exists. This is set to
"/" on DOS and Windows systems where sep is a backslash.



pathsep

The character conventionally used by the OS to separate search patch
components (as in $PATH), e.g. ":" for POSIX or
";" for DOS and Windows.



defpath

The default search path used by exec*p*() if the environment
doesn't have a 'PATH' key.



linesep

The string used to separate (or, rather, terminate) lines on the
current platform. This may be a single character,
e.g. '\n' for POSIX or '\r' for MacOS, or multiple
characters, e.g. '\r\n' for MS-DOS and MS Windows.







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