Even if you’ve only dabbled with python for a minute or two, you’ve probably already figured out that you can print variables using placeholders. You might have tried concatenation too. However, did you know you can print using %s but with the variable names directly?

With python 3 you can override the print function’s delimiter value to make it null or whatever else you want. But if you’re stuck with 2.5 or 2.6 like the rest of us, try this on for size. The only problem with this is when you want to use it like a progress bar. If you do this in a loop over time, you will get the expected output, but over time it won’t be the way you expected.

If you want to select a range of lines from a file, look no farther than your handy ‘sed’ utility. It is by definition, the perfect tool for the job!