Problem scenario
You are trying to install python-snappy on Ubuntu (or a Debian distribution of) Linux.  You go here and find no obvious dependencies or prerequisites:
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/python-snappy

But when you try to install it, you run “python setup.py build” and get an error like this:

“/usr/lib/python2.7/distutils/dist.py:267: UserWarning: Unknown distribution option: ‘install_requires’
  warnings.warn(msg)
running build
running build_py
package init file ‘__init__.py’ not found (or not a regular file)
package init file ‘__init__.py’ not found (or not a regular file)
running build_ext
building ‘_snappy’ extension
x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc -pthread -DNDEBUG -g -fwrapv -O2 -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -fno-strict-aliasing -Wdate-time – D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -g -fstack-protector-strong -Wformat -Werror=format-security -fPIC -I/usr/include/python2.7 -c 

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Continue reading “How Do You Install python-snappy on an Ubuntu/Debian Linux Server?”

Problem scenario
You are not sure if snappy (the Python development tool) is installed.  You try these two commands:

python
>>> import snappy

You see this:

“
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File “<stdin>”, line 1, in <module>
  File “snappy.py”, line 50, in <module>
    from snappy_cffi import UncompressError, compress, decompress, \
 

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Continue reading “How Do You Check if snappy Is Installed?”

Problem scenario
You are trying to use subprocess and check_output in Python to run raw Bash/shell/Linux commands.  

Your Python program has a line like this:
subprocess.check_output(“/usr/local/bin/coolprog arg1 /path/to/file.txt arg3”)

You get this error when you run the program:

 File “/usr/lib/python2.7/subprocess.py”, line 566, in check_output

What do you do?

Solution
This solution only applies if the Bash command is constructed from known good input. 

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Continue reading “How Do You Fix a Python Program That Returns an Error “…subprocess.py … in check_output”?”