On 09 December 1999, Andrew M. Kuchling said:
After poking around in the O'Reilly POSIX book, here's a list of POSIX functions that don't seem to be available in Python. Not all of them seem worth supporting. Ironically, Greg Ward's daemonize() Perl subroutine, which started me on this, doesn't actually seem to need anything that Python doesn't have.
I think I already pointed this your way, but don't forget the man page for Perl's POSIX module: "perldoc POSIX". I suspect POSIX functions that don't make sense in Perl also don't make sense in Python. I agree with all your assessments about what's worth adding and what's not, and that {close,read,open}dir() are questionable and probably not worth the bother. Random thoughts:
abort() -- used in Py_FatalError(), but not accessible to Python code
Would this do the same as in C, ie. terminate the process and dump core?
getlogin() -- returns user's login name -- could do something similar with pwd.getpwuid( os.getuid() )[0], but getlogin() apparently looks in utmp
With a documentation proviso that utmp is very old-fashioned, and you really should do the getuid() thing unless you definitely want to get the login ID from utmp. Perhaps an alternate "getlogin" (different name?) that does the getuid() thing could be provided. Greg