Automation

Best Practice

Python

It seems like most automation scripts are in Python.

1. Standard
   For example, for parameters passed through command line, we use argparse.
   If scripts will be ran in some Automation Server like Jenkins, third-party libraries may be hard to include.

• parser.parse_args() return a Namespace.
  ? Namespace
  a dictionary that maps a name to an object
  ? Why Namepace
  in case name conflicts

• String substitution
  ? There are many was to implement string substitution. Which way should I select?
  If the string contains '$'s, for example, bash script, Template is tricky.

• File content substitution
  ? What is sed
  a stream editor
  ? What is a stream editor
  Perform basic text transformations on an input stream(a file or input from a pipeline)
  ? How to use sed
  sed SCRIPT INPUTFILE…
  ? e.g. To replace all occurrences of ‘hello’ to ‘world’ in the file input.txt and write output to output.txt
  sed ‘s/hello/world/g’ input.txt > output.txt
  ? How to filter contents of the standard input
  don’t specify INPUTFILE, or set INPUTFILE as -
  ? Where is output
  – writes output to standard output : by default
  – edit files in-place : use -i, e.g. sed -i ‘s/helllo/world/g’ file.txt. in MAC OS, the -i flag expects a mandatory argument. So sed -i ‘’ ‘s/helllo/world/g’ file.txt if you don’t need any extension.
  – writes output to other files: use s///w, here output means lines substituted only, rather than the whole input content
  – writes substituted input to other files: sed ‘’ ‘s/helllo/world/g’ > otherfile.txt
  ? Why is sed good
  sed treats multiple input files as one long stream
  ? What is s in sed, g in sed?
  s means substitute
  g means global, all matching occurrences in the line would be replaced