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up vote 5 down vote favorite

I want to automatically configure my fstab in python by running a script. I thought of using ConfigParser in python, but I am unable to use it properly.

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I voted to migrate this to StackOverflow. You may be speaking about editing a particular file on a *nix OS, but your asking about doing so in a programming language (which means, to me, that the answer is more concerned with programming than with *nix). –  HalosGhost 2 days ago
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@HalosGhost shell programming is often about editing a particular file and it is always in some programming language, as long as it is for U&L administrative purposes, I don't think we should move all of those questions. –  Anthon 2 days ago
    
@Anthon, shells are often *nix specific. This isn't a shell programming question, it's a Python question. But, I don't have the ability to migrate; it was just a vote. –  HalosGhost 2 days ago
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2 Answers 2

up vote 7 down vote accepted

You can using fstab module.

Its documentation here.

Example:

fstab = Fstab()

for entry in fstab.entries:
    pprint.pprint(entry)
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up vote 4 down vote

This will not work because /etc/fstab file doesn't conform to the format the ConfigParser supports.

As man 5 fstab indicates, the /etc/fstab file is a whitespace separated file with 6 columns. The Python ConfigParser is a library for Parsing files commonly known as .ini files that, simplified, consist of sections that contain key/value pairs:

 [section_name1]
 key1 = value1
 key2 = value2
 [section_name2]
 key3 = value3

Parsing the fstab file yourself is relatively easy. Just copy all the comment lines (those with first non-whitespace character '#') and split the other lines using .split() to the 6 fields. I use that to rearrange my fstab file to be only 79 columns.

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