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 operating system to refer to the current directory. For example: '.' for POSIX or ':' for the Macintosh.

pardir: The constant string used by the operating system to refer to the parent directory. For example: '..' for POSIX or '::' for the Macintosh.

sep: The character used by the operating system to separate pathname components, for example, "/" 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 operating system 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 operating system to separate search patch components (as in PATH), such as ":" for POSIX or ";" for DOS and Windows.

defpath: The default search path used by exec*p*() and spawn*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, such as '\ n' for POSIX or '\r' for Mac OS, or multiple characters, for example, '\r\n' for DOS and Windows.

See About this document... for information on suggesting changes.