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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