Python for Unix and Linux System Administration

Chapter 4. Documentation and Reporting

As we do, you may find that one of the most tedious, least desirable aspects of your job is to document various pieces of information for the sake of your users. This can either be for the direct benefit of your users who will read the documentation, or perhaps it may be for the indirect benefit of your users because you or your replacement might refer to it when making changes in the future. In either case, creating documentation is often a critical aspect of your job. But if it is not a task that you find yourself longing to do, it might be rather neglected. Python can help here. No, Python cannot write your documentation for you, but it can help you gather, format, and distribute the information to the intended parties.

In this chapter, we are going to focus on: gathering, formatting, and distributing information about the programs you write. The information that you are interested in sharing exists somewhere; it may be in a logfile somewhere; it may be in your head; it may be accessible as a result of some shell command that you execute; it may even be in a database somewhere. The first thing you have to do is to gather that information. The next step in effectively sharing this information is to format the data in a way that makes it meaningful. The format could be a PDF, PNG, JPG, HTML, or even plain text. Finally, you need to get this information to the people who are interested in it. Is it most convenient for the interested parties ...