Hmmmm, not sure it's a good idea to try and parse these directly.  It will make this code very limited in terms of Linux distro's supported for testing, and it will never work with Windows or any other OS.  Anyway, I don't think any of these functions are actually called from your test, no?  If not, I'd suggest just dropping them from the module.  We have enough code to maintain w/o adding unused code to the list.