python vs awk for simple sysamin tasks

[Donald 'Paddy' McCarthy]

Matthew Thorley wrote:
> My friend sent me an email asking this:
> 
>  > I'm attemtping to decide which scripting language I should master and 
>  > was wondering if it's possible to do
>  > these unixy awkish commands  in python:
>  >
>  > How to find the amount of disk space a user is taking up:
>  >
>  > find / -user rprice -fstype nfs ! -name /dev/\* -ls | awk '{sum+=$7};\
>  > {print "User rprice total disk use = " sum}'
>  >
>  > How to find the average size of a file for a user:
>  >
>  > find / -user rprice -fstype nfs ! -name /dev/\* -ls | awk '{sum+=$7};\
>  > {print "The ave size of file for rprice is = " sum/NR}'
> 
> I wasn't able to give him an afirmative answer because I've never used 
> python for things like this. I just spent the last while looking on 
> google and haven't found an answer yet. I was hoping some one out there 
> might have some thoughts ?
> 
> thanks much
> -matthew
I think you will find that the examples could be re-written in python 
(or perl), but assuming you have created the one liners above and so 
know your way around 'the basics' then you would be most productive in 
leaving a space for find and bash and sed and awk and grep ... for 
mainly smaller scripts Python is not good for one liners but tends to be 
easy to maintain.
I don't believe that you should abandon AWK once you learn Python, 
especially if you do Sys-Admin work. Python has a broad range of uses 
but it is not better than AWK in all cases, as I think others have shown 
in the thread by giving a much longer Python version of an example.

Cheers, Paddy.