On Fri, Aug 9, 2013 at 2:50 PM, Adam Mercer <ramer...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Fri, Aug 9, 2013 at 8:42 AM, Antoon Pardon > <antoon.par...@rece.vub.ac.be> wrote: > >> That is probably beside the point. I suspect Adam is just giving a >> minimal example to show the kind of thing he is trying to do. >> >> Nit picking the specific example instead of advising on the problem >> is likely to be less than helpful. > > It is a simplified example, but in this case the nitpicking was very > helpful. Caused me to think about the problem differently, and > therefore come up with a neater solution.
It wasn't nitpicking so much as suggesting a more Pythonic way to do things. It's entirely plausible that the response would have been "Actually, the real command is more complicated than 'echo' so I really do need a pipe", but it's *very* common in shell scripts to call on an external process to do something that in other languages is a builtin. For instance, how do you get the name of the parent of your current directory in bash? Something along the lines of: parent=$(dirname $(pwd$)$) which executes two external commands. In Python, it would be: os.path.dirname(os.getcwd()) which is two internal function calls. It's just one of the things to consider when porting code from one language to another - I wouldn't often use a list comprehension in bash, and I wouldn't often want a pipe between two external processes in Python. ChrisA -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
