6.1.6 Miscellanenous System Data

The follow data values are used to support path manipulation operations. These are defined for all platforms.

Higher-level operations on pathnames are defined in the os.path module.

curdir

The constant string used by the OS to refer to the current directory, e.g. '.' for POSIX or ':' for the Macintosh.

pardir

The constant string used by the OS to refer to the parent directory, e.g. '..' for POSIX or '::' for the Macintosh.

sep

The character used by the OS to separate pathname components, e.g. "/" for POSIX or ":" for the Macintosh. Note that knowing this is not sufficient to be able to parse or concatenate pathnames -- use os.path.split() and os.path.join() -- but it is occasionally useful.

altsep

An alternative character used by the OS to separate pathname components, or None if only one separator character exists. This is set to "/" on DOS and Windows systems where sep is a backslash.

pathsep

The character conventionally used by the OS to separate search patch components (as in $PATH), e.g. ":" for POSIX or ";" for DOS and Windows.

defpath

The default search path used by exec*p*() if the environment doesn't have a 'PATH' key.

linesep

The string used to separate (or, rather, terminate) lines on the current platform. This may be a single character, e.g. '\n' for POSIX or '\r' for MacOS, or multiple characters, e.g. '\r\n' for MS-DOS and MS Windows.