[Tutor] Newby Linux Program review + help with regular expressions

[Lie Ryan]

David wrote:
> This program generates a report of a Linux System and some important 
> ..conf files. The goal is for users to be able to post their information 
> and compare with others, ask for help etc. Am I using the subrocess 
> module too much because I am comfortable with the commands? Should I 
> just write this type of program in bash. I am trying to get rid of all 
> the comments generated in the report. I got rid of blank lines and lines 
> starting with #. But can not figure out how the get rid of a line like;
>         #This is a comment with 5 spaces
> I never programed before so everything is new to me.
> Here is my code;
> http://asterisklinks.com/wiki/doku.php?id=wiki:gentoo_report
> The report it generates is at the bottom. I didn't want to post it all 
> here.
> Thanks,
> -david
> 

Why are you piping the shell while you ordered the shell to redirect 
output to a file, then dumping the pipe?

def uname_report():
     p = subprocess.Popen("uname -a >> /root/gentoo_report.txt",
			shell=True, stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
     return p.stdout.readlines()

You should choose either one, use the pipe and write to the report file 
yourself (more flexibility) or use the shell >> redirection. Also, I'd 
rather not use search and replace if I decided to put the report file 
somewhere else.

PS: for unix-style program, the report should be outputted to the stdout