
Ask HN: What is the most amazing python script you ever wrote to save your time? - santudey
I am researching about the scripts that save time. If you did something amazing it&#x27;s time to tell the HN.
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sdfjkl
Many moons ago, when I was young and working as a lowly IT service monkey, the
client (a huge corporation) decided to migrate from their prehistoric, image-
deployed Win95 setup to a centrally managed WinXP setup. This went about as
terribly as you can expect and we ended up with a long checklist of things
that needed fixing manually, on each of the 1200 computers we were responsible
for.

So I stayed an hour or two longer every couple days and each time picked one
task from the checklist and wrote a Python script that would do that job for
me (such as making sure some .INI file were having the right settings, or some
registry settings were set, or some installer was run).

Soon enough, the script was doing enough of my work so that my time could be
spent working on the script instead of mindnumbingly editing the same INI file
over and over again, and eventually the script did everything. I shared it
with my colleagues and soon the 40-point checklist was reduced to: 1. Run the
script.

It also provided me with excellent job security and a route into later
software development jobs :)

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hanselot
I wrote a script that allows me to acquire videos from a very popular video
providing site (YOU mighT have Used it BEfore) from channels on said site, and
converts them into mp3's, tags them with metadata from eyed3 and then adds
them to my music library for use when I DJ over the weekends. This script has
saved me possibly more than 4 hours a week of manually hunting down music,
plus if I need to get a specifically popular (stupid) song (despacito), I can
always buy that on gmusic and just manually add it.

~~~
sunstone
A rebel just for kicks.

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gusmd
Related:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14339959](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14339959)

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codegeek
I bought a business in 2014 and needed to migrate customers from the previous
owner's stripe account into ours. At the time, stripe didn't have an easy way
of doing it and I wrote a python script to handle that.

[https://gist.github.com/codegeek1001/69d0419b332ea1e206b4](https://gist.github.com/codegeek1001/69d0419b332ea1e206b4)

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albertyw
I built git-browse: [https://github.com/albertyw/git-
browse](https://github.com/albertyw/git-browse)

After getting tired of constantly searching github and phabricator, I built a
small tool that would open git repositories, files, branches, and commits in
the browser.

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sds111
I have data-collection systems that bring in readings around a solar power
plant. It all comes in as CSV files. So I use Python to collect that data and
archive the data with files named by the day's data, at midnight. Then another
Python program collects all the archived files from each system and brings it
into another hard-drive-based system where all the files named by the same
date are collected together. It then runs gnuplot for .png representations of
each, and then calls Imagemagick to make montages for each day which include
data from each kind of sensor. Love Python.

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nuna
I wrote a script to move automatically parse and move laboratory data off of
instruments

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inondle
Wrote a script to generate json for data-driven testing. The script looks at a
table and transforms that data into json describing the values in each
row/column of the table.

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dmlim
I wrote a Python script to aid with converting database backups into CSV
files. The script takes a folder of encrypted .zip files (each containing a
database backup), decrypts the .zip, converts the SQL data to CSV, and renames
the output file according to my desired format. Turned a ~1-minute process I
had to follow for each individual file, into an automated one-click step that
I can run on an entire batch, all while I'm working on something else

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Noumenon72
I wrote one that parses the help desk tickets for IDs and spits out the SQL,
bash, and vi commands that I use to resolve them. That way I only have to deal
with the hiccups and typos.

I wrote one to rename my 300 DBVisualizer connections so I could get to them
by typing the initials of the server and database. It also put the department
number on the end. I wasn't good enough to parse the XML so I just went
through line by line.

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marktangotango
I wrote a script generated Java dto objects by filling in templates.
Essentially the same stuff lombok gives for free. But this was a Big Dumb Corp
on an ancient version of java. And due to their requirement had to have nearly
the same dtos in five different areas of the code. Saved me carpal tunnel
typing all that bs.

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svisser
Do you specifically want it to be about Python scripts or also other
languages?

~~~
mmerlin
Yes why only Python?

