[Tutor] Newbie: First program - looking for feedback :)

[Danny Yoo]

On Tue, 6 Jan 2004, Christian Wyglendowski wrote:

> > I find i am getting comfortable with GNU/Linux now, and it has
> > recently encouraged me to try my hand at programming; for those times
> > when you wished you had a little tool to do something :).  The
> > possibilty of helping the open source commnunity by contributing to
> > software development etc is also a plus, although a distant dream at
> > this point. ;)
>
> Good goals.  I have had the most fun with some of the little "tools"
> that I have written for mine and others' benefit.  I hope to contribute
> to the open source world someday as well.


Hi Christian,



Yup.  *grin*  Here's an example of a tool that I wrote for myself just
today.  It's called 'flip':


###
"""flip: A small utility to reverse the columns from lines in standard
input.

Todo: add delimiter option using optparse.
"""

import fileinput

for line in fileinput.input():
    words = line.split()
    words.reverse()
    print "\t".join(words)
###


So say that I'm at a Unix command line, and I want to calculate md5sums:

###
-bash-2.05b$ md5sum flip
c957c64326962b9d7fa477ac00340751  flip
###



With 'flip', I can now reverse the order of the columns so that the
filename comes first:

###
-bash-2.05b$ md5sum flip
c957c64326962b9d7fa477ac00340751  flip
-bash-2.05b$ md5sum flip | flip
flip    c957c64326962b9d7fa477ac00340751
###


Python is a great tool for augmenting the command line.



Talk to you later!