Newbie question...

[Ken Seehart]

Ken D'Ambrosio wrote:
> First, apologies for such a newbie question; if there's a better forum 
> (I've poked around, some) feel free to point it out to me.  Anyway, a 
> mere 25-odd years after first hearing about OOP, I've finally decided 
> to go to it, by way of Python.  But this puzzles me:
>
> import commands
> free = commands.getoutput("free")
> for line in free:
>    print line,
>
> Gives:
>                           t o t a l               u s e d  f r e e
>          s h a r e d         b u f f e r s           c a c h e d
> M e m :                 5 1 5 9 9 2           4 6 0 4 5 2             
> 5 5 5 4 0
>                    0             7 7 5 1 6             9 1 8 8 4
> - / +   b u f f e r s / c a c h e :           2 9 1 0 5 2           2 
> 2 4 9 4 0
>
> Why are there spaces between everything?  And how do I keep it from 
> happening?  *confused*
>
> Thanks much,
>
> -Ken
> ** Posted from http://www.teranews.com **
> -- 
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
>
The variable 'free' is a string containing all of the output, not a file 
object or a sequence of strings.  Therefore, when you iterate free you 
iterate a sequence of characters.  This is different than the case of 
iterating an open file, which would give you a sequence of lines as you 
expect.

So ...

   print line,

... prints each character followed by a space and no newline.

You can do this instead:

import commands
free = commands.getoutput("free")
print free


- Ken (that's my name too)