Python for Linux System Administration and Automated Operations

This book distills the author's experience using Python in NetEase cloud platform development, database kernel development, and large-scale system operations. Taking Linux system administration as its thread and the Python language as its vehicle, it is a hands-on guide to solving the real-world problems encountered in system administration and automated operations with Python. The book is logically organized into five parts and 11 chapters, each of which can be read independently: the introduction (Chapter 1) discusses Python's strengths and weaknesses and why it suits Linux system administration, and offers guidance on choosing between Python 2 and Python 3; the tools part (Chapter 2) systematically covers advanced pip usage, vim and PyCharm, IPython and Jupyter, pdb and ipdb debugging, PEP 8 and pycodestyle, autopep8 code style checking, and environment management with pyenv and virtualenv; the scripting part (Chapters 3 to 7) successively introduces building command-line tools with argparse, click, logging, and ConfigParser; text processing with strings, regular expressions, and character-set encoding, plus Jinja2 templates; reading, writing, searching, comparing, and archive management for files with os.path, glob, shutil, tarfile, zipfile, and more; monitoring Linux systems with dstat, glances, and the /proc directory; and generating documentation and reports; the automation part (Chapters 8 to 10) covers Scapy network sniffing, Fabric automated operations, and Ansible automated deployment; and the integrated case study part (Chapter 11) uses "Building a MySQL Database Expert System with Python" to tie together advanced language features and system architecture design. The book includes numerous reproducible hands-on cases such as Apache access log analysis, duplicate file detection, archive backup, and MongoDB deployment, emphasizing "learn it, then use it," and can serve as an advanced practical textbook for Python.