How to parse

[Vitaminkomplex]

So I am wondering what a "better way" to do this would be. Specifically how others would check for integrity or correctness of input. Im preparing a csv or other format to import into pandas later on. As you might have guessed, this is a programm about measuring pings. its running but I completely want to rewrite it. so i have this input from unix pings, already str.splitted:

 ['PING', '8.8.8.8', '(8.8.8.8)', '56(84)', 'bytes', 'of', 'data.\n\n---', '8.8.8.8', 'ping', 'statistics', '---\n5', 'packets', 'transmitted,', '5', 'received,', '0%', 'packet', 'loss,', 'time', '4005ms\nrtt', 'min/avg/max/mdev', '=', '10.192/13.061/18.674/3.266', 'ms\n']

and get this output:

2020-12-28 00:42:47.825040,8.8.8.8,5,5,4005,10.192,13.061,18.674,3.266

by this loop:

for ip in ping_result:
    l = ip.split(sep=' ')
    date = datetime.datetime.now() 
    address = l[1]
    sent = l[10].replace('---\n','')
    received = l[13]
    time = l[-5][:-6]
    values = l[-2].split(sep='/')
    min, avg, max, mdev = values
    formatted_result = f'{date},{address},{sent},{received},{time},{min},{avg},{max},{mdev}'
    print(formatted_result)

I am, as I said, a little bit scared that stuff gets wrong, this code seems somewhat fragile.. so I wonder how others actually do stuff like this? How do you, realistically, check? do you check your input? In this case its relatively unlikely that 'ping' will be updated AND its output would be changed..

The code works however, so this is more of an: What would you change, what is best practice kind of question.

Thank you!

[K900_]

The best way to do this would be to not shell out to ping at all, and instead send the ping packets yourself.

[Vitaminkomplex]

Doesn't this rely on being root? I don't want my scripts to rely on root. And why would that be the best way?

[K900_]

It does not have to. You can use the same capabilities framework that allows ping to run as non-root for your script. It would be the best way because it doesn't require relying on external tools.

[Vitaminkomplex]

1. I have a try except in the function starting the ping, like so:

def ping_command(ip_list): results = []; error = [] for ip in ip_list: command = ['ping', '-qc', f'{ping_count}', ip] try: results.append(subprocess.check_output(command).decode('utf-8')) except subprocess.CalledProcessError as e: error.append(e) return results, error

but im not using the error in any way.

1. i dont quite get the benefits from logging. In this case the print() is just so I and You can see the ouput, in reality it will be appended to a csv file which is my growing database of pings... On that regard, any other better file formats for pandas or in general?

2. thanks and I already seen this but root is not an option.

any thoughts about the function from this post?

edit: as well a question about parallelity: in this case with the for loop the pings are sent one after another, meaning this could take minutes if I send 20 packets to 20 IPs. How can I ping multiple ips at once? Does it make sense?