[Tutor] Unix commands python

[Kooser, Ara S]

Thank you very much. I will try that out.

Ara

-----Original Message-----
From: Andrew Fant [mailto:andrew.fant at tufts.edu] 
Sent: Tuesday, April 27, 2004 11:29 AM
To: 'tutor at python.org'
Cc: Kooser, Ara S
Subject: Re: [Tutor] Unix commands python


Ara,
   It is possible to use unix commands from within python, but I would 
suggest that you would get further in this case by using the split method 
in the strings module.
If you are reading lines from a file into a string called 'foo', you can 
write something like:

splitfoo=foo.split()

and then reference each column as splitfoo[x] where x is some number 
between zero and the number of fields.

I've been doing the same sort of thing for parsing performance data to pass 
into our web-graphing software, and it's much faster to chop it up in 
python than to spawn child processes to do it in awk.

HTH

Andy


--On Tuesday, April 27, 2004 11:01:54 -0600 "Kooser, Ara S" 
<askoose at sandia.gov> wrote:

>
> Hello all,
>
>   I am new at python and I am working on a file conversion program. 
> Thank you for all the advice that got me to this point. Is it possible 
> to invoke unix commands in python, such as awk or cut? I am trying to 
> cut some columns of text and then transform one of those columns with 
> user input. Thanks.
>
> Ara