15. 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:

select   Wait for I/O completion on multiple streams.
thread   Create multiple threads of control within one interpreter.
threading   Higher-level threading interface.
dummy_thread   Drop-in replacement for the thread module.
dummy_threading   Drop-in replacement for the threading module.
mmap   Interface to memory-mapped files for Unix and Windows.
readline   GNU readline support for Python.
rlcompleter   Python identifier completion, suitable for the GNU readline library.

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