Email notifications.

Frequently, you may start some long task, like a build or a SCM sync, that might take some time to finish, and you might not want to hang around to see it finish or fail. Additionally, if it does fail, you might wish to contact someone via email.

So I just had to put together a tool, that would let me run an arbitrary command with arbitrary parameters, and pipe stdout/stderr/return status into an email. The tool handles locale/encoding correctly, tails a configurable amount of interspersed stdout/stderr output in the body of the email in a fixed size font, and lets you attach both stdout and stderr in full as separate attachments. It also provides run times for the run task. Uses SMTP via MTA/MSA, and supports TLS+auth. Unless requested, still prints to console all stdout/stderr.

Not the prettiest or best code ever, as I didn't have time, and I'm not really a Python person. It only depends on markup.py, because I was lazy and didn't want to deal with generating HTML.

< 2.6.36 and ioctl

I didn't realize all ioctl()s were handled with the BKL, unless of course a driver used the new unlocked_ioctl way of doing things. Of course with 2.6.36, you don't have a choice any longer =).