8.16 nis -- Interface to Sun's NIS (Yello Pages)

Availability: UNIX.

The nis module gives a thin wrapper around the NIS library, useful for central administration of several hosts.

Because NIS exists only on Unix systems, this module is only available for Unix.

The nis module defines the following functions:

match (key, mapname)

Return the match for key in map mapname, or raise an error (nis.error) if there is none. Both should be strings, key is 8-bit clean. Return value is an arbitary array of bytes (i.e., may contain NULLand other joys).

Note that mapname is first checked if it is an alias to another name. XXX Describe list of all aliases? Internal for the C code, so I'm not sure it's a good idea.

cat (mapname)

Return a dictionary mapping key to value such that match(key, mapname)==value. Note that both keys and values of the dictionary are arbitary arrays of bytes.

Note that mapname is first checked if it is an alias to another name.

maps ()

Return a list of all valid maps.

The nis module defines the following exception:

error

An error raised when a NIS function returns an error code.