Python Library Reference

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8.16 nis -- Interface to Sun's NIS (Yellow Pages)

Availability: UNIX.

The nis module gives a thin wrapper around the NIS library, useful for central administration of several hosts.

Because NIS exists only on Unix systems, this module is only available for Unix.

The nis module defines the following functions:

match(key, mapname)

Return the match for key in map mapname, or raise an error (nis.error) if there is none. Both should be strings, key is 8-bit clean. Return value is an arbitrary array of bytes (i.e., may contain NULL and other joys).

Note that mapname is first checked if it is an alias to another name.

cat(mapname)

Return a dictionary mapping key to value such that match(key, mapname)==value. Note that both keys and values of the dictionary are arbitrary arrays of bytes.

Note that mapname is first checked if it is an alias to another name.

maps()

Return a list of all valid maps.

The nis module defines the following exception:

exception error

An error raised when a NIS function returns an error code.

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Python Library Reference

Previous: 8.15.2 Resource Usage Up: 8. Unix Specific Services Next: 8.17 syslog

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Release 2.1.2, documentation updated on January 16, 2002.