1.15. sys — System-specific parameters and functions

This module provides access to some variables used or maintained by the interpreter and to functions that interact strongly with the interpreter. It is always available.


sys.exit([arg])

Exit from Python. This is implemented by raising the SystemExit exception, so cleanup actions specified by finally clauses of try statements are honored, and it is possible to intercept the exit attempt at an outer level.

sys.print_exception()
sys.path

A list of strings that specifies the search path for modules.

sys.argv

The list of command line arguments passed to a Python script. argv[0] is the script name (it is operating system dependent whether this is a full pathname or not).

sys.version

A string containing the version number of the Python interpreter. Do not extract version information out of it, rather, use version_info and the functions provided by the platform module.

sys.version_info

A tuple containing the three components of the version number: major, minor and micro. The version_info value corresponding to the Python version 3.4 is (3, 4, 0).

sys.implementation

An object containing information about the implementation of the currently running Python interpreter. The following attributes are required to exist in all Python implementations.

name is the implementation’s identifier, e.g. ‘micropython’. The actual string is defined by the Python implementation, but it is guaranteed to be lower case.

version is a named tuple, in the same format as sys.version_info. It represents the version of the Python implementation. This has a distinct meaning from the specific version of the Python language to which the currently running interpreter conforms, which sys.version_info represents. For example, for Micropython 1.8 sys.implementation might be (1, 8, 0), whereas sys.version_info would be (3, 4, 0).

sys.platform

This string contains a platform identifier that can be used to append platform-specific components to sys.path, for instance.

sys.byteorder

An indicator of the native byte order. This will have the value 'big' on big-endian (most-significant byte first) platforms, and 'little' on little-endian (least-significant byte first) platforms.

sys.modules

This is a dictionary that maps module names to modules which have already been loaded. This can be manipulated to force reloading of modules and other tricks. However, replacing the dictionary will not necessarily work as expected and deleting essential items from the dictionary may cause Python to fail.