[Tutor] Checking for executables

[Bradford R. Bowman]

I am writing a script that is a wrapper for a number of other utilities
often found on *nix workstations, including the rar and par2 utilities.
I want the script to check whether those utilities are installed at the
outset (and not when they are needed later on in the script, which I
suppose I could just use exception handling to do).  Here's what I have
now:

import commands
for cmd in ('rar', 'par2'):
  if commands.getstatusoutput('which ' + cmd)[0] != 0:
  print "Fatal error: cannot find the %s executable." % cmd
  sys.exit()

This appears to work, but, as I'm just beginning with
python/programming, I thought there might be something in the standard
library that just does what I want.  Am I recreating the wheel here?


-- 
Bradford R. Bowman
GnuPG Public Key available at:
http://mazirian.com/


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://mail.python.org/pipermail/tutor/attachments/20050724/7cb148f0/attachment.pgp