Python Authlog Log File analysis

Question

I recently started to play around with Python 3 which I enjoy a lot. I'm a sysadmin in apprenticeship so I have nearly no programming experience. I want to make a small program which is going to tell me everytime someone logs into my system via ssh. I'm going to use the espeak-python bindings. What is the best way to analys the log file in real time?

So everytime someone logs into the system via SSH I can hear it over my speakers :-). I don't want a complete Solution just a few points so I know where to start...

Answer 1

Should the program run in a terminal or as a service? If run as a service you should consider looking at a library like python-daemon . If you only want to run it in a terminal a usual endless loop (which will then be aborted by a ctrl+c) should do fine.

For playing sound to the speakers you could look at PyAudio . I used it for my sound-related projects. Its website (with good examples) can be found here

To parse the file you can open it (maybe after opening do a read() to discard any log entries that was made before starting the program). Then you can do a readline() in every run of the loop. The retrieved line may be empty. If that's the case no login was attempt. If you got a line you only need to check if there's the word 'sshd' in the line and if yes someone logged in via ssh.