os — Miscellaneous operating system interfaces

Source code: Lib/os.py

This module provides a portable way of using operating system dependent functionality. If you just want to read or write a file see open(), if you want to manipulate paths, see the os.path module, and if you want to read all the lines in all the files on the command line see the fileinput module. For creating temporary files and directories see the tempfile module, and for high-level file and directory handling see the shutil module.

Notes on the availability of these functions:

  • The design of all built-in operating system dependent modules of Python is such that as long as the same functionality is available, it uses the same interface; for example, the function os.stat(path) returns stat information about path in the same format (which happens to have originated with the POSIX interface).

  • Extensions peculiar to a particular operating system are also available through the os module, but using them is of course a threat to portability.

  • All functions accepting path or file names accept both bytes and string objects, and result in an object of the same type, if a path or file name is returned.

  • On VxWorks, os.popen, os.fork, os.execv and os.spawn*p* are not supported.

  • On WebAssembly platforms, Android and iOS, large parts of the os module are not available or behave differently. APIs related to processes (e.g. fork(), execve()) and resources (e.g. nice()) are not available. Others like getuid() and getpid() are emulated or stubs. WebAssembly platforms also lack support for signals (e.g. kill(), wait()).

Note

All functions in this module raise OSError (or subclasses thereof) in the case of invalid or inaccessible file names and paths, or other arguments that have the correct type, but are not accepted by the operating system.

exception os.error

An alias for the built-in OSError exception.

os.name

The name of the operating system dependent module imported. The following names have currently been registered: 'posix', 'nt', 'java'.

See also

sys.platform has a finer granularity. os.uname() gives system-dependent version information.

The platform module provides detailed checks for the system’s identity.

File Names, Command Line Arguments, and Environment Variables

In Python, file names, command line arguments, and environment variables are represented using the string type. On some systems, decoding these strings to and from bytes is necessary before passing them to the operating system. Python uses the filesystem encoding and error handler to perform this conversion (see sys.getfilesystemencoding()).

The filesystem encoding and error handler are configured at Python startup by the PyConfig_Read() function: see filesystem_encoding and filesystem_errors members of PyConfig.

Changed in version 3.1: On some systems, conversion using the file system encoding may fail. In this case, Python uses the surrogateescape encoding error handler, which means that undecodable bytes are replaced by a Unicode character U+DCxx on decoding, and these are again translated to the original byte on encoding.

The file system encoding must guarantee to successfully decode all bytes below 128. If the file system encoding fails to provide this guarantee, API functions can raise UnicodeError.

See also the locale encoding.

Python UTF-8 Mode

Added in version 3.7: See PEP 540 for more details.

The Python UTF-8 Mode ignores the locale encoding and forces the usage of the UTF-8 encoding:

Note that the standard stream settings in UTF-8 mode can be overridden by PYTHONIOENCODING (just as they can be in the default locale-aware mode).

As a consequence of the changes in those lower level APIs, other higher level APIs also exhibit different default behaviours:

  • Command line arguments, environment variables and filenames are decoded to text using the UTF-8 encoding.

  • os.fsdecode() and os.fsencode() use the UTF-8 encoding.

  • open(), io.open(), and codecs.open() use the UTF-8 encoding by default. However, they still use the strict error handler by default so that attempting to open a binary file in text mode is likely to raise an exception rather than producing nonsense data.

The Python UTF-8 Mode is enabled if the LC_CTYPE locale is C or POSIX at Python startup (see the PyConfig_Read() function).

It can be enabled or disabled using the -X utf8 command line option and the PYTHONUTF8 environment variable.

If the PYTHONUTF8 environment variable is not set at all, then the interpreter defaults to using the current locale settings, unless the current locale is identified as a legacy ASCII-based locale (as described for PYTHONCOERCECLOCALE), and locale coercion is either disabled or fails. In such legacy locales, the interpreter will default to enabling UTF-8 mode unless explicitly instructed not to do so.

The Python UTF-8 Mode can only be enabled at the Python startup. Its value can be read from sys.flags.utf8_mode.

See also the UTF-8 mode on Windows and the filesystem encoding and error handler.

See also

PEP 686

Python 3.15 will make Python UTF-8 Mode default.

Process Parameters

These functions and data items provide information and operate on the current process and user.

os.ctermid()

Return the filename corresponding to the controlling terminal of the process.

Availability: Unix, not WASI.

os.environ

A mapping object where keys and values are strings that represent the process environment. For example, environ['HOME'] is the pathname of your home directory (on some platforms), and is equivalent to getenv("HOME") in C.

This mapping is captured the first time the os module is imported, typically during Python startup as part of processing site.py. Changes to the environment made after this time are not reflected in os.environ, except for changes made by modifying os.environ directly.

This mapping may be used to modify the environment as well as query the environment.