This is a very generic observation as I don't have a lot of specifics with me right now. I have noticed over the past two years that the python "re" module is somewhat unreliable. At the suggestion of someone quite some time ago, I started to use the deprecated "pre" module. "import pre as re". All my problems went away.
So here I am two years later, writing another script and I had forgotten about "pre" and wallah $ python proc.py Traceback (most recent call last): File "proc.py", line 39, in ? c = collect("nohup.out") File "proc.py", line 20, in collect m = p.search(cont) RuntimeError: maximum recursion limit exceeded As soon as I switched "import re" to "import pre as re" my program worked as expected. In the words of Jerry Sienfeld, what's up with that? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list