CSIS 354
FILE MANIPULATION WITH PYTHON ASSIGNMENT INSTRUCTIONS
OVERVIEW
Scenarios are quite common where an IT professional is tasked with modifying a file on many
computer systems or many files on a single computer or a combination of the two. For example,
a large software may need the copyright notice comment to be changed on every source file in a
project. Or, a configuration file may need to be modified on every server in a multi-server
deployment. Doing this task manually is not a viable way to approach the problem. Instead, a
better solution is to use a scriptable environment to perform search and replace functionality on
the files in question. Python is an excellent tool for this kind of task.
INSTRUCTIONS
Samba is a unix/linux file sharing suite of programs designed to provide Windows interoperable
file and print sharing services. Much of the configuration for the Samba daemon is provided by
the text file smb.conf (renamed to smb.txt for this assignment). After an update was deployed to
three dozen linux servers it was discovered that a couple of configured parameters were
incorrect. Unfortunately, since there are unique aspects to each server, copying the contents of a
single file to each server is not a viable solution. To fix the problem, the IT department must
connect to each server, edit the smb.conf file, and restart the smbd daemon. To automate this
task, each server will have a Python script copied to it. Then an SSH session will be initiated to
each server from which the script will be executed. Your task is to write the Python script.
The invocation of the script must be as follows:
python modify.py fileSpec “from” “to”
where,
modify.py is the name of your script
fileSpec is the name of the file to be modified (smb.txt)
“from” is the text to be searched for (be sure to enclose any white space in quotes)
“to” is the text the searched text is to be replaced with.
Testing the script is your responsibility. However a good test case is:
python modify.py smb.txt “password sync = yes” “password sync = no”
Hints
Accessing command line arguments in Python requires the sys module. Consequently, your
script must have the “import sys” directive. To access individual arguments, use sys.argv[x]
where x is the argument number. I.e. the first argument would be accessed by sys.argv[1]. Note
that sys.argv[0] is the name of the script and not used in this assignment.
Specifying command line arguments from an IDE differs depending on the IDE. For PyCharm
CE, select Run -> Edit Configurations and place them on the Parameters field. For example:
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CSIS 354
Also, recognize that you will open two files, one for reading and one for writing. I highly
recommend that you append a “.new” to the file to be written while debugging. Otherwise, you
will corrupt your input file while testing.
How do you open a file in Python for reading or writing? It is very easy, to open for reading:
inPointer = open(fileSpec, 'r')
where “fileSpec” is the filename and ‘r’ tells Python that you want to read the file. The variable
inFile is sometimes called a “pointer” to the file. Essentially it is a reference that allows one to
operate on the file.
Similarly, to open a file for writing:
outPointer = open(fileSpec,'w')
where fileSpec is the same as the reading example and ‘w’ tells Python the file is for writing.
Just as inPointer, outPointer is a “pointer” to the opened file to write.
Now what? To read from the file you can read one line at a time, all the lines, or the entire file
into a string. See python.org for all available methods but the following will read the next line of
a file into a string.
line = inFile.readline() # reads the next line of text into a string
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Once you read the contents, you need to search for occurrences of “from” and replace them with
“to”. How? Strings have a replace method such that you can loop through the lines and do a
search and replace for each occurrence. Next write the modified line to a new file.
Once you get to the end of the file, close both the read file and the write file and you’re done!
Just to get you started, the following takes the arguments from the command line and opens the
input file and an output file:
import sys
fileSpec = sys.argv[1] # read file name first argument
searchText = sys.argv[2] # text to search for
replaceText = sys.argv[3] # text to replace with
outFile = fileSpec + '.new' # write file = read file with .new appended
outPointer = open(outFile,'w') # open write file
inPointer = open(fileSpec, 'r') # open read file
Test your code completely. At each step of the test take a screen shot and embed it into a Word
document. Submit the Word document to the appropriate assignment.
Submit your Python source files and any other relevant material.
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