I think I agree with Steve here. I suspect you should either have sufficiently trained your users in Python, or have limited them to one-line statements which you could then strip of leading whitespace before passing them to Python, or even offered the alternative of one or the other. This would not have been much extra work.
As for shell scripts generating Python code, I am not sure what you were trying to do, but if you're going that far why not just replace the shell script with a python script altogether? os.system() is your friend. I also agree with Steve that I can't see what this has to do with makefiles. (But then I think "make" is a thoroughly bad idea in the first place, and think os.system() is my friend.) mt -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list