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Python to read services Description

I want my python script to read the windows service description, In order to decide whether to stop it \ make it run only manually..
The point is that I don't find the method that reads the Description.
(may be something like 'GetServiceDescription').
help anyone?

You can use wmi library also follow other answers like List running processes on 64-bit Windows.
i haven't tested this but this should be the short snippet to list them reference,
import wmi
c = wmi.WMI()
for service in c.Win32_Service(): #if its win32
print service.Name
Follow this tutorial
If you find it tough to follow may be looking at the tutorial may help or come again with another question.

Using a TLB-defined interface with Python and COM

I will try to keep this question as tight as possible, but if it seems that I am saying insane things, it is almost certainly because I am ignorant of some key point, so please do correct me.
I am writing a program, in a Windows environment, that will interface with an existing application that has a COM interface to allow 3rd-party software to interact with it.
I have read all of the documentation for this application, and it says that there is a TLB file that defines the functions and data available via COM.
How do I use the TLB file with python? How do I discover the progID of the application so that I can interface with it (this isn't given in the documentation).
I'm pretty lost. I have a fair amount of experience with Python, but I am completely new to developing in a Windows environment. Any help would be enormously helpful. I have been reading all the documentation on win32com, but I still have no clue what to do, as no one addresses -- as far as I have seen -- bringing in a TLB file.

The questions asked is to link the custom TLB file with COM client to be developed in python. I have done a small example code for my COM server developed in C# and same is accessed by python client using "comtypes" package.
The below snippet of code gives:
import comtypes.client as CC
import comtypes
ccHandle = CC.CreateObject("CSharpServer.InterfaceImplementation")
print (ccHandle)
import comtypes.gen.CSharpServer as CS
InterfaceHandle = ccHandle.QueryInterface(CS.IManagedInterface)
print ("output of PrintHi function = ", InterfaceHandle.PrintHi("World"))
The above python script is for the C# COM server code available at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa645738(v=vs.71).aspx (refer to the File 1: CSharpServer.cs).

OK, it's been a while since I've done this, and I'm not a COM expert by any means. Read the COM chapter from Python Programming on Windows to see how to do this. Follow along with the examples (trying things out against Excel) to get a feel of how things work.
First off, install the PyWin32 Extensions if you haven't already. This is the package that gives you pythonwin.exe and the COM interface modules. Get it from here.
Then you are going to open the "COM Makepy Utility" from PythonWin's Tools menu. Browse through the list of registered COM components (some will be typelibs, others DLLs) until you identify the one you have (you have to do a bit of detective work). Click OK to generate the Python glue code. You will then need to run it again with the -i command-line argmument to generate the boilerplate code so your python script can use this glue. Here's a paraphrase of the O'Reilly example for the Microsoft Excel Object library:
import win32com.client
from win32com.client import gencache
gencache.EnsureModule('{00020813-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}', 0, 1, 2)
earlyBound = win32com.client.Dispatch("Excel.Application")
lateBound = win32com.client.dynamic.Dispatch("Excel.Application")
print earlyBound.ActiveCell()
Using early-bound objects is optional, but it does improve performance.
To find the ProgID is again a bit of detective work, although this answer seems to imply it's going to be hard. Try poking around the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT hive of the registry with RegEdit to see if you see a ProgID that looks promising.

Trying to write Python script to remove duplicate fonts Mac OSX

I am trying to write a utility to check through the fonts on OSX and remove duplicates - so far I've had success iterating through the folder structure and writing out an xml file containing fonts and paths. The drawback is that this doesn't find duplicates as the same font can be installed twice in different locations but with a different file name; font family information is internal to the font file.
I have found this: List of installed fonts OS X / C
import Cocoa
manager = Cocoa.NSFontManager.sharedFontManager()
font_families = list(manager.availableFontFamilies())
Which uses PyObjC to list installed fonts. This looks like a possible solution but I'm not a heavy weight coder and know nothing about PyObjC! I did have a play around in a terminal with dir(manager)and dir(NSFontManager)to see if I could find a method that returned the file paths of installed fonts but to no avail.
Any help gratefully received.
Best wishes
//Simon

Install the fonttools package and take a look at this blog post. There's a script there that gives the font name of its first argument and I'm sure you could adapt it to your use case.

Thanks once again for the replies - I just wanted to update this in the hope it helps. I'm looking at fontTools now, but admit I am having trouble finding documentation. According to the developer's page there are libraries to handle other fonts apart from ttf, but I'm still looking with little success just yet!
In the mean time, I did turn up this page on Using Apple Font tools, which seems get half way to what I need - ie listing installed fonts and locations. It looks like the ftxinstalledfonts command will accept a pipe so in theory I could pipe the output to my existing python script that builds an xml database. I'm assuming I can do this by calling ftxinstalledfonts via the sys module but am not clear as to how to get the output... I'll go and plunder the python docs but if there's no luck and someone has 10 secs to give a pointer I'd be grateful.
As a quick aside, the Font Geek site above has some very useful stuff about TTX as well.
Best wishes
//Simon

Google app engine QR code decoder

I was wondering if there is a good library for python for decoding QR code. Basically what I would like is to give library image with QR code on it and the library would output contents saved in image.

Have you already looked at : http://pyqrcode.sourceforge.net/
If code compiling does not work for you, then there is also pure python implementation at : http://github.com/hcvst/pyqr

If you're still looking for something to do this a year later, you should check the ZBar project at http://zbar.sourceforge.net/. It looks like it started out for 1-D barcodes but has been expanded to include QR. It's implemented in C, LGPL licensed, and in addition to source has binaries for Linux, Windows and iPhone. Bindings available for Python, Perl, Ruby.
As of August 17, 2011 the core image processing portion of ZBar hasn't been updated since 2009 but there is recent activity on the iPhone development part of the project, which I'll interpret as the core being stable. There's also some activity in the SourceForge forums for the project.
It's also possible that pyxing (https://github.com/holizz/pyxing) would work but all that's there is an initial checkin of the port, so it's up to the (possible) user to check it.

I've looked before with no success. Two problems are that native c code can't be compiled and you can't get access to the file system.
pyqrcode didn't work out and neither did zxing.

Try qrtools
, It has a nice enough interface
from qrtools import QR
myCode = QR(filename=u"/home/psutton/Documents/Python/qrcodes/qrcode.png")
if myCode.decode():
print myCode.data
print myCode.data_type
Output
123456
text

Detecting symlinks (mklink) on Vista/7 in Python without Pywin32

Currently the buildout recipe collective.recipe.omelette uses junction.exe on all versions of Windows to create symlinks. However junction.exe does not come with Windows by default and most importantly does not support creating symlinks to files (only directories) which causes a problem with quite a few Python packages.
On NT6+ (Vista and 7) there is now the mklink utility that not only comes by default but is also capable of creating symlinks to files as well as directories. I would like to update collective.recipe.omelette to use this if available and have done so except for one otherwise simple feature; detecting whether a file or folder is actually a symlink. Since this is a small buildout recipe, requiring Pywin32 in my opinion is a bit too much (unless setuptools could somehow only download it on Windows?).
Currently on Windows what omelette does is call junction.exe on the folder and then grep the response for "Substitute Name:" but I can't find anything as simple for mklink.
The only method I can think of is to call "dir" in the directory and then to go through the response line by line looking for "<SYMLINK>" and the folder/filename on the same line. Surely there is something better?

See jaraco.windows.filesystem (part of the jaraco.windows package) for extensive examples on symlink operations in Windows without pywin32.

Could you use ctypes to access the various needed functions and structures? this patch, currently under discussion, is intended to add symlink functionality to module os under Vista and Windows 7 -- but it won't be in before Python 2.7 and 3.2, so the wait (and the requirement for the very latest versions when they do eventually come) will likely be too long; a ctypes-based solution might tide you over and the code in the patch shows what it takes in C to do it (and ctypes-based programmed in Python is only a bit harder than the same programming in C).
Unless somebody's already released some other stand-alone utility like junction.exe for this purpose, I don't see other workable approaches (until that patch finally makes it into a future Python's stdlib) beyond using ctypes, Pywin32, or dir, and you've already ruled out the last two of these three options...!-)

On windows junctions and symbolic links have the attribute FILE_ATTRIBUTE_REPARSE_POINT (0x400) for reparse points. If you get the file's attributes, then detect this on?
You could use ctypes (as stated in the other answer) to access Kernel32.dll and GetFileAttributes, and detect this value.

You could leverage the Tcl you have available with Tkinter, as that has a 'file link' command that knows about junctions, unlike Pythons os module.

I have searched widely for a better solution, however python 2.7 just does not have a good solution for this. So eventually, I ended up with this (code below), its admittedly ugly, but it's downright pretty compared to all the ctypes hacks I've seen.
import os, subprocess
def realpath(path):
# not a folder path, ignore
if (not os.path.isdir(path)):
return path
rootpath = os.path.abspath(path)
oneup, foldername = os.path.split(rootpath)
output = subprocess.check_output("dir " + oneup, shell=True)
links = {}
for line in output.splitlines():
pos = line.find("<SYMLINKD>")
if not pos == -1:
link = line[pos+15:].split()
links[link[0]] = link[1].strip("[]")
return links[foldername] if links.has_key(foldername) else rootpath