Been doing a lot of Python programming recently and have found that I keep writing the same kinds of utilities. I thought I’d define them all here in functions so that I could cut and paste them as and when I need them. If you’re lucky I’ll write a little explanation (or tutorial) of how they work for the novice Pythoners out there. Display sorted environment

import os
def printenv():
  s = sorted(os.environ.items())
  for e in s:
    print "%s=%s" % e

os.environ is a map (collection of key/value pairs) so items turns it into a list of tuples so that it can be iterated over in a for loop. Each tuple contains the key and value of the map entry. The body of the for loop could also be written:

map_key = s[0]
map_value = s[1]
print "%s=%s" % (map_key, map_value)

or

map_key, map_value = s
print "%s=%s" % (map_key, map_value)

but you would only be adding extra stages.