(You top-posted, instead of adding your part to the end. That's frowned
upon in a mailing list, at least in this one.)
(You replied privately, and forgot to CC the tutor list. I'm forwarding
it there with my response)
David Eric wrote:
wow thank you
yes...youre right i did want to pass a list of strings
im copying the sample program and adding my own directories, i missed what
the example was trying to show in that instance.
as far as the recursive option, you mean the -r would process all
subdirectories under /Users?
im sorry for being so ignorant on this but what would be an example of an
innoucuous script?
On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 3:23 PM, Dave Angel <da...@ieee.org> wrote:
David Eric wrote:
doing a python tutorial and one of the assignments says to develop a
program
that backsup files to zip files into a backup directory
im using Darwin 10.0.0 unix version:
this is what i came up with thus far, i did copy the sample program given
but made changes for my unix OS:
#!/usr/bin/env python
# Filename : backup_prog.py
import os
import time
source = '/Users/davidteboul/bin/python'
target_dir = '/Users/davidteboul/backups'
target = target_dir + os.sep + time.strftime('%Y%m%d%H%M%S') + '.gz'
zip_command = "gzip -qr {0} {1}".format(target, ' '.join(source))
if os.system(zip_command) == 0:
print('Successful backup to', target)
else: print('Backup FAILED')
When launching external programs you're not familiar with, you really need
to do a dry-run test, just to be sure. It wouldn't have been hard to come
up with something that trashes your system. (Ask me, I issued a Unix
command once that was deleting all files in a valuable tree, and the only
thing that saved my bacon was that Unix file I/O was so slow. It only did
about two files per second, so I was able to Ctrl-C after only losing about
5 files, all of which were quickly recoverable. The next directory down
would have been a disaster, however, and had it completed, we would have had
to restore from the previous night's nightly backup, effectively wasting the
day for most employees.)
I see two problems, but since I don't know gzip, there may very well be
more.
The -r switch on nearly all Unix utilities means "recurse" which means to
process all subdirectories of the starting location.
The ' '.join(source) takes your source string, and puts spaces as every
second character. The only thing I can think of you might have meant was to
pass it a list of strings. So if source were
source = ['/Users/davidteboul/bin/python', '/Users/davidteboul/bin/perl']
then it'd make sense.
Anyway, I'd launch some innocuous script, that echoes its arguments, rather
than trying it directly on gzip. And of course, I'd look at the man page
for gzip, to see just what its arguments are supposed to look like.
DaveA
I haven't used Unix in over 15 years, so I don't remember. But I think
it had something like 'echo' that simply echoed its arguments to
stdout. In Windows, I'd make a one-line batch file like:
Echo Running %0 script, with parameters %*
or
Echo Running %0 script, with parameters %1, %2, %3, %4, %5
The script could also display things like the current directory, maybe
some environment variables. Whatever might be relevant to help see
what's going on.
The -r switch should mean to process all files in
/Users/davidteboul/bin/python, plus all files in any of its
subdirectories. Not starting at /Users, just starting in that
...../python directory.
HTH
DaveA
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