Suppose that you have a program that runs another program and uses itsoutput; for example, you have a high level analysis program that runsa low level state gathering command (or several commands) to gathervarious information.Here is something that I have recently learned the hard way:

You really want to give your high level program an option to getthis status output from a file instead of by running the commands.

Doing this saves you from having to recreate a specific scenarioeach time you want to test how your

One of my always-running programs is a little Tkinter-based Pythonapp. For a while now I've noticed that it was accumulating a surprisingamount of CPU time and would sometimes show up on top as active,despite me not doing anything with it. Today I finally got around tofiguring out why, and the answer is that Tkinter's main loop effectivelybusy-waits in some Python environments.

The standard way for Tkinter-based programs to operate is to make all ofthe Tkinter calls to