Python Documentation?

[Gerhard Häring]

Cc-ing python-list because it might be of general interest.

Cameron Laird wrote:
> In article <mailman.1062427383.11085.python-list at python.org> you write:
>>[1] If nothing else, I could then add "does anybody actually directly 
>>use this cra^wmodule?" to the page for ftplib <0.1 wink>
>>
> 
> What *is* going on there?  Do you use Twisted instead?

I needed a quick way to "stat" files via FTP (it's a mirror script that 
synchronizes the maps, etc. on Unreal Tournament 2003 gameservers). As 
ftplib lacks any methods whatsoever to parse the output of the LIST 
command, I searched for something higher level and found ftputil [1], 
which is quite nice to use.

Unfortunately, the stat command of ftputil was very inefficient (it 
basically does a LIST for every stat() you call), so I extended it with 
a statall() method for my mirror script.

Being annoyed with Python's ftplib I wasn't surprised that the ftpcp 
function in the module didn't work for me, while calling the Linux ftp 
client (well, whatever /usr/bin/ftp was at that machine ;-) worked fine 
when using the appropriate PROXY commands.

My current solution creates a script that is then fed into the ftp 
client program. Yes, I need an appropriate ~/.netrc file :-/ It's quite 
a hack, but I needed a solution fast ;-)

The good part was [2] that I learnt that FTP actually has one useful 
feature: server-to-server copy, which has the additional benefit of not 
creating any significant traffic on the controlling client.

-- Gerhard

[1] http://www.ndh.net/home/sschwarzer/python/python_software.html
[2] thanks to deltab on #python