PART II

System Programming

This first in-depth part of the book presents Python’s system programming tools—

interfaces to services in the underlying operating system as well as the context of an

executing program. It consists of the following chapters:

Chapter 2

This chapter provides a comprehensive first look at commonly used system inter-

face tools. It starts slowly and is meant in part as a reference for tools and techniques

we’ll be using later in the book.

Chapter 3

This chapter continues the tour begun in Chapter 2, by showing how Python’s

system interfaces are applied to process standard streams, command-line argu-

ments, shell variables, and more.

Chapter 4

This chapter continues our survey of system interfaces by focusing on tools and

techniques used to process files and directories in Python. We’ll learn about binary

files, tree walkers, and so on.

Chapter 5

This chapter is an introduction to Python’s library support for running programs

in parallel. Here, you’ll find coverage of threads, process forks, pipes, sockets,

signals, queues, and the like.

Chapter 6

This last chapter is a collection of typical system programming examples that draw

upon the material of the prior four chapters. Python scripts here perform real tasks;

among other things, they split and join files, compare and copy directory trees, test

other programs, and search and launch files.

Although this part of the book emphasizes systems programming tasks, the tools

introduced are general-purpose and are used often in later chapters.

Do

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