I wrote a simple plugin (dstat_externalBackup.py) for dstat to monitor the filesystem free space and placed it in /usr/share/dstat and it works as intended. dstat --externalBackup 3600extern free  226G  226GThe code is below. As you may notice, the filesystem being monitored is hard coded in the plugin which is suboptimal. Has anyone figured out how to pass a parameter to the plugin so I can enter the filesystem to monitor on the command line?### Author: J. Hendrix / Dag Wieers    class dstat_plugin(dstat):    '''    Provides a test playground to test syntax and structure.    '''    def __init__(self):        self.name = 'externalBackup'        self.nick = ( 'free' , )        self.vars = ( 'text' , )        self.type = 's'        self.width = 6        self.scale = 0    def extract(self):        import subprocess        import re        temp1 = subprocess.check_output( [/bin/df , -h , --output=avail, /media/jhendrix/externalBackup ] )         temp2 = re.search( '\n([^\n]+)\n' , temp1 )        self.val['text'] = temp2.group( 1 )
Passing a parameter to a dstat plugin
python;monitoring;programming