16 Optional Operating System Services

The modules described in this chapter provide interfaces to operating system features that are available on selected operating systems only. The interfaces are generally modeled after the Unix or C interfaces but they are available on some other systems as well (e.g. Windows or NT). Here’s an overview:

• 1. select — Waiting for I/O completion
• 2. threading — Higher-level threading interface
• 3. thread — Multiple threads of control
• 4. dummy_threading — Drop-in replacement for the threading module
• 5. dummy_thread — Drop-in replacement for the thread module
• 6. multiprocessing — Process-based “threading” interface
• 7. mmap — Memory-mapped file support
• 8. readline — GNU readline interface
• 9. rlcompleter — Completion function for GNU readline