14.1.6 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, Unix 95, Unix 98, and others). Some platforms define additional names as well. The names known to the host operating system are given as the keys of the confstr_names dictionary. For configuration variables not included in that mapping, passing an integer for name is also accepted. Availability: Macintosh, Unix.

If the configuration value specified by name isn't defined, None 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: Macintosh, Unix.

getloadavg( ): Return the number of processes in the system run queue averaged over the last 1, 5, and 15 minutes or raises OSError if the load average was unobtainable.
New in version 2.3.

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: Macintosh, 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: Macintosh, 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 Mac OS 9. Also available via os.path.

pardir: The constant string used by the operating system to refer to the parent directory. For example: '..' for POSIX or '::' for Mac OS 9. Also available via os.path.

sep: The character used by the operating system to separate pathname components, for example, "/" for POSIX or ":" for Mac OS 9. 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. Also available via os.path.

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 Windows systems where sep is a backslash. Also available via os.path.

extsep: The character which separates the base filename from the extension; for example, the "." in os.py. Also available via os.path. New in version 2.2.

pathsep: The character conventionally used by the operating system to separate search path components (as in PATH), such as ":" for POSIX or ";" for Windows. Also available via os.path.

defpath: The default search path used by exec*p*() and spawn*p*() if the environment doesn't have a 'PATH' key. Also available via os.path.

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 Windows. Do not use os.linesep as a line terminator when writing files opened in text mode (the default); use a single '\n' instead, on all platforms.

devnull: The file path of the null device. For example: '/dev/null' for POSIX or 'Dev:Nul' for Mac OS 9. Also available via os.path. New in version 2.4.

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