Python, OSX, and Computer Name

Sounds thrilling! No not host name, but the name you give your computer -- so my multi-core beast is "NeXTcyl" (like a NeXT cube but a cylinder).

It was somewhat difficult to find, well, not the best way to do this in Python, but the only way I could find to do it in Python for OSX. Lots and lots of method for hostname: no no no Google, not that. You want to call out to scutil, a command line program.

import subprocess
this_computer = subprocess.check_output(["scutil", "--get", "ComputerName"])

Essentially, use the subprocess library to call a command line function, use the check_output component to get the output from it (important!), and the three parts of the command line command are all cut up into the different arguments you hand the call (also important!). I tried about four other approaches before this one, and then had to try about three different syntaxes to get it to work, since I couldn't find any good online help. Here you go. For OSX, not Windows or other *nixes. No idea what they will do (nothing bad, but maybe not what you want).

(Because I have a 3.6 GB file I don't want to put in DropBox, so I have a local copy on my desktop and on my laptop, but the files are in different paths on each, so I wanted a way to detect which machine the code was running on so as to call the right file path -- I could have just tried one path and if it failed use the other, but, I only just thought of that now.)