[ubuntu-us-in] hard drive tools* ssh ftp suggestions

[Rob Ludwick]

> Of course a neat trick in python is to use popen2() and use dd without
> an "of" paramter.  dd sends the data to standard out, which in python
> through popen2() becomes a file.  (Yay!)  You know how many bytes you
> get because you you can count them and you would get an EOF before you
> were done reading blocksize.  At this point you would adjust your dd
> parameters to start at the next 512 byte block on the drive.  And then
> you can just use python to interleave the 4k blocks.  

This runs dd in popen.  

#!/usr/bin/env python

import popen2

inputfile = "/dev/zero"
outputfile = "/tmp/test"

bs=2**16

dd = "dd if=" + `inputfile` + " bs=" + `bs` + " count=1"
file = open(outputfile, "w")
(outfd, infd) = popen2.popen2(dd)
buf=outfd.read()
if len(buf) != bs:
  print "error."
else:
  print "success!"
  file.write(buf)
file.close()
infd.close()
outfd.close()