Quick way to get the users home directory in Unix/Linux and Windows

This python class converts a permission mask in symbolic format (the kind a diretcory listing produces, ex.: drwxr-xr-x) to a string that's usable in a chmod command.

ex.: chmod u=rwx,g=rwx,o=rwtx ~/myscripts/convert_mask.py

This can be very useful when recovering permissions from a backup.

Python example set-up script from python.org docs.

This is snippet of code solves the interesting (and specialized) problem of generating all permutations of a list. I hope you like recursion. For exmaple:

permute( [0,1,2] )

would return

[[0,1,2],[0,2,1],[1,0,2],[1,2,0],[2,0,1],[2,1,0]]