How do *you* use Python in non-GUI work?

[Irmen de Jong]

John Salerno wrote:
> Hey all. Just thought I'd ask a general question for my own interest. Every time I
> think of something I might do in Python, it usually involves creating a GUI
> interface, so I was wondering what kind of work you all do with Python that does
> *not* involve any GUI work. This could be any little scripts you write for your own
> benefit, or what you do at work, if you feel like talking about that! :)
> 
> Thanks.

- web server/blog/wiki. This doesn't have a gui if you don't consider HTML pages a gui
- various scripts to help me during software deployment and testing
   (for instance log file analyzers, automated web clients)
- network communications library that tries hard to just get out of your way ;-)
- file processing scripts to do more sophisticated stuff than basic search/replace
- most recent script is a little tool that downloads the latest version of some 
World-Of-Warcraft addon, extracts it to the game folder after deleting the old one 
first, and then copies a backup to a network drive. I just doubleclick the .py file and 
it dumps the results in a console window that closes after a few seconds. Who needs a 
gui for that?

Also, I often find myself opening a Python prompt to just execute simple tasks that I 
see other people needing big tools or even online services for:
- base-64 encoding/decoding
- md5/sha hashing
- simple string or regular expression operations
- simple math
- unicode decoding/encoding
- etc etc.


--irmen de jong