Book Image

Python Automation Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Jaime Buelta
Book Image

Python Automation Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Jaime Buelta

Overview of this book

In this updated and extended version of Python Automation Cookbook, each chapter now comprises the newest recipes and is revised to align with Python 3.8 and higher. The book includes three new chapters that focus on using Python for test automation, machine learning projects, and for working with messy data. This edition will enable you to develop a sharp understanding of the fundamentals required to automate business processes through real-world tasks, such as developing your first web scraping application, analyzing information to generate spreadsheet reports with graphs, and communicating with automatically generated emails. Once you grasp the basics, you will acquire the practical knowledge to create stunning graphs and charts using Matplotlib, generate rich graphics with relevant information, automate marketing campaigns, build machine learning projects, and execute debugging techniques. By the end of this book, you will be proficient in identifying monotonous tasks and resolving process inefficiencies to produce superior and reliable systems.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
14
Other Books You May Enjoy
15
Index

Reading file metadata

File metadata is everything associated with a particular file that is not the data content itself. The most obvious is the file name, but there are more parameters available such as the size of the file, the creation date, or its permissions.

Browsing through that data is important, for example, to filter files older than a date, or to find all files bigger than a value in KBs. In this recipe, we'll see how to access the file metadata in Python.

Getting ready

We'll use the zen_of_python.txt file, available in the GitHub repository (https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Python-Automation-Cookbook-Second-Edition/blob/master/Chapter04/documents/zen_of_python.txt). As you can see, by using the ls command, the file is 856 bytes, and, in this example, it was created on June 14:

$ ls -lrt zen_of_python.txt
-rw-r--r--@ 1 jaime staff 856 14 Jun 21:22 zen_of_python.txt

On your computer, the dates may vary, based on when you downloaded the...