14.3. netrc — netrc file processing
Source code: Lib/netrc.py
The netrc class parses and encapsulates the netrc file format used by
the Unix ftp program and other FTP clients.
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class
netrc.netrc([file])
A netrc instance or subclass instance encapsulates data from a netrc
file. The initialization argument, if present, specifies the file to parse. If
no argument is given, the file .netrc in the user’s home directory will
be read. Parse errors will raise NetrcParseError with diagnostic
information including the file name, line number, and terminating token.
If no argument is specified on a POSIX system, the presence of passwords in
the .netrc file will raise a NetrcParseError if the file
ownership or permissions are insecure (owned by a user other than the user
running the process, or accessible for read or write by any other user).
This implements security behavior equivalent to that of ftp and other
programs that use .netrc.
Changed in version 3.4: Added the POSIX permission check.
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exception
netrc.NetrcParseError
Exception raised by the netrc class when syntactical errors are
encountered in source text. Instances of this exception provide three
interesting attributes: msg is a textual explanation of the error,
filename is the name of the source file, and lineno gives the
line number on which the error was found.
14.3.1. netrc Objects
A netrc instance has the following methods:
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netrc.authenticators(host)
Return a 3-tuple (login, account, password) of authenticators for host.
If the netrc file did not contain an entry for the given host, return the tuple
associated with the ‘default’ entry. If neither matching host nor default entry
is available, return None.
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netrc.__repr__()
Dump the class data as a string in the format of a netrc file. (This discards
comments and may reorder the entries.)
Instances of netrc have public instance variables:
-
netrc.hosts
Dictionary mapping host names to (login, account, password) tuples. The
‘default’ entry, if any, is represented as a pseudo-host by that name.
-
netrc.macros
Dictionary mapping macro names to string lists.
Note
Passwords are limited to a subset of the ASCII character set. All ASCII
punctuation is allowed in passwords, however, note that whitespace and
non-printable characters are not allowed in passwords. This is a limitation
of the way the .netrc file is parsed and may be removed in the future.