So I was was trying to run pylint and nosetest running on a Jenkins instance; but these python commands tend to return a non zero status code if they see a non zero return code. This is a problem as it means that any further steps are ignored. The most obvious thing to try was this:

pylint src/openhea -f parseable ; true

The problem is that both statements are treated as separate steps so when the first one fails it never does the return true. Instead, and pointed out by a helpful chap in the #efdhack2012 room was to do the following

pylint src/openhea -f parseable || true

This correctly ignores the false status code, the only wrinkle is that you need to be careful when piping the output, it has to be to the left of the bars.

pylint src/openhea -f parseable > output.report || true