Introducing system modules in Python

Python provides in its standard library some system modules, of which we will highlight three:

• The os module
• The sys module
• The subprocess module

These modules allow us to access functionalities such as knowing the Python environment we are executing, managing directories, finding information about the interpreter, and the possibility to execute commands in the operating system.

In this first section of the chapter, we’ll review the main modules you can find for working with the Python interpreter, the operating system, and for executing commands with the subprocess module.

The system (sys) module

The sys module allows us to interact with the interpreter and it contains most of the information related to the execution in progress, updated by the interpreter, as well as a series of functions and low-level objects.

Let’s take a look at an example. sys.argv contains the list of parameters for executing...