[Tutor] Automation

[Danny Yoo]

On Tue, 13 Jul 2004, kumar s wrote:

>  I have ~ 50 tar gzipped files and they have thousands of files with
> .dta and .out extensions.  These files are from mass spectrometer runs.
>
>  I have another program that combines all the .dta files in to one large
> combined program.  Until now what I am doing is - taking one tar gzipped
> file, unzipping and untar it in to a directory. Then using the small
> program that combines all the .dta files in to one single .dta file.
> After this I am cleaning all small .dta and .out files.
>
> Doing this for each tar gzipped file is pain in the neck.  Is it easy to
> write a small python program? How should I write.  Please can you
> provide some help.

Hi Kumar,


Yes, you can do this kind of automation in Python.  Here are example
articles that talk about automating common system administration tasks:

    http://www.unixreview.com/documents/s=9083/sam0401d/
    http://www.samag.com/documents/s=8964/sam0312a/0312a.htm


You'll probably want to use some functions from the Standard Library to
call out to 'tar', and to cull out your '.dta' files. The functions:
'os.system()' and 'glob.glob()' should be helpful here:

    http://www.python.org/doc/lib/os-process.html#l2h-1520
    http://www.python.org/doc/lib/module-glob.html#l2h-2183


Hope this helps!