Exploratory query

[Don Todd]

In article <mailman.1060056189.31290.python-list at python.org>, Skip Montanaro wrote:
> 
>     Don> Would python allow me to run flist and use its output, or would I
>     Don> need to re-write flist? The idea is to keep something on the screen
>     Don> and poll the mailboxes every n seconds and update the display.
> 
> You can do this quite easily.  Presuming you just want to display flist's
> output for now, but maybe mangle it later, you can probably get away with
> something simple like this:
> 
>     import time
>     import commands
> 
>     while True:
>         status, output = commands.getstatusoutput("flist")
>         if status != 0:
>             print "flist barfed... exiting"
>         # right here you could massage output
>         print output
>         time.sleep(300)         # five minutes
> 
> Skip

Thanks, Skip! That pretty much does what I want; I modified it to do
"flist mailbox1", "flist mailbox2" etc. 

Is there a way to run this in a terminal and have it uptate the new over
the old? I'm thinking it would be sweet to run it in tranparent
terminal. Perhaps I'll look into using a gui, too.

dt