[Tutor] Matching problem....

[Michael P. Reilly]

> I'm working on a silly project -- an APOP server -- <cough> and I'm having
> a problem coming up with an equivalent to the following command line. I'd
> rather not just have this as a commands.getstatusoutput() (which I could
> do and is in fact what I'm doing now...)
> 
> cat /var/spool/mail/deirdre | grep ^From\  | wc
> 
> or, for you egrep fans:
> 
> egrep '^From\ ' /var/spool/mail/deirdre | wc
> 
> What I want is ONLY the count of the matches. I don't, at this point, care
> a hoot about the matches themselves. That comes later. :)
> 
> I'm *also* interested in the following:
> 
> egrep '^From\ ' /var/spool/mail/deirdre -b
> 
> ...but at a different point in time. :)

Starting with:
  >>> import string
  >>> mbox = open(mboxfname).read()

How about:
  >>> howmanymsgs = len(string.split(mbox, '\nFile '))

This runs in under a second for 80 msgs totaling about 1.5 Mbytes.

And from the grep side, you could run. ;)
  grep -c '^From ' /var/spool/mail/deirdre

Good luck.
  -Arcege

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Michael P. Reilly, Release Engineer | Email: arcege@shore.net        |
| Salem, Mass. USA  01970             |                                |
------------------------------------------------------------------------