8. Unix Specific Services

The modules described in this chapter provide interfaces to features that are unique to the Unix operating system, or in some cases to some or many variants of it. Here's an overview:

posix   The most common POSIX system calls (normally used via module os).
pwd   The password database (getpwnam() and friends).
grp   The group database (getgrnam() and friends).
crypt   The crypt() function used to check Unix passwords.
dl   Call C functions in shared objects.
dbm   The standard ``database'' interface, based on ndbm.
gdbm   GNU's reinterpretation of dbm.
termios   POSIX style tty control.
tty   Utility functions that perform common terminal control operations.
pty   Pseudo-Terminal Handling for SGI and Linux.
fcntl   The fcntl() and ioctl() system calls.
pipes   A Python interface to Unix shell pipelines.
posixfile   A file-like object with support for locking.
resource   An interface to provide resource usage information on the current process.
nis   Interface to Sun's NIS (Yellow Pages) library.
syslog   An interface to the Unix syslog library routines.
commands   Utility functions for running external commands.

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