os.execl()

[Brian E Gallew]

Then <eli at udel.edu> spoke up and said:
> User-Agent: Pan/0.9.7 (Unix)
> NNTP-Posting-Host: 65.1.161.108
> 	I have a question about the ececl function from the os module. I was
> trying to write a script to untar a bunch of tarballs in a directory. The
> script looked like this
> 
> #!/usr/bin/env python
> 
> import os
> 
> os.system("ls *.gz > data_file")
> 
> tar_file = open("data_file"), "r")
> 
> tar_array = tar_file.readlines()
> 
> for tarball in tar_array:
> 	os.execl("tar", "xzvf", tarball)
> 
> os.system("rm data_file")

That really won't do what you want it to do.  You probably want to do
something like this:

#! /usr/bin/env python
import os,glob

cmd = [ '/usr/bin/tar',
	'-x',
	'-z',
	'-f',
      ]

tar_file_list = glob.glob('*.tar.gz')

for tar_file in tar_file_list:
    if os.fork():
       os.wait()
    else:
       os.exec(cmd[0], cmd + [tar_file,])