There are times that I have wanted to install some Python module on a system where I did not have access to do so.
When you do not have permission to write into the standard library directories you
may need to run the “python setup.py install” command with the additional option of

 --home=<Some other directory>

make sure that this base directory has a lib/python directory within it and that you have
exported the PYTHONPATH variable to contain this directory.

Then simply run the command “python setup.py install –home=<Some other directory>” and your libs will
be installed.

Then you will need to make sure that your PYTHONPATH environment variable is always available
to whatever runs your scripts.

As an alternative to the PYTHONPATH, you can use the following within your scripts to target a non-standard python module directory:

import sys
sys.path.append("/path/to/the/module/directory")
## import any modules you have in your own directory

Using the method in the script allows you to make the scripts available to other users that may not have the PYTHONPATH setup.

Tags: Python

There is a simple Linux utility for counting characters, lines and words in files called wc. This allows you to give a file as an argument or a stream and get the counts of the aforementioned items.

wc <filename>

or

cat <filename> | wc

The options that wc accepts

The ouput with no arguments will be three numbers (words,lines,characters. Otherwise the the number will reflect the argument you have passed.

And if you pass multiple filenames the output displays counts for all files and totals.

 >wc -l HelloWorld.java sample.txt
    8 HelloWorld.java
   25 sample.txt
   33 total

Tags: Shell, Utilities