Hello fellow Python users I've always used Python as shell scripting language to automate tasks in various projects, especially when doing complex work where Bash gets messy.
While Python is a much more powerful language than Bash, I've always found the builtin subprocess.Popen APIs a bit inconvenient to invoke external commands, especially for creating pipelines and doing redirection. Surely one can use shell=True and Popen will invoke the shell, but this is not without drawbacks since one has to deal with shell-specific syntax particularities, such as argument quoting. To make shell scripting in Python more convenient, I've created a new module: https://github.com/tarruda/python-ush. The README and tests contains more detailed examples but here's an idea of how it looks like: import ush sh = ush.Shell() ls, sort = sh('ls', 'sort') # by default, wait for command to exit and return status code for each in # pipeline. stdin, stdout and stderr are inherited. ls_exit_code, sort_exit_code = (ls | sort)() # iterate output, line by line for f in ls | sort: print(f) # collect all output into a string str(ls('-la') | sort('--reverse')) # redirect stdout ls | sort | 'output.txt' # append output to a file (ls | sort | '+output.txt')() # redirect stdin ('input.txt' | sort)() # filename expansion ls('*.py', glob=True) The module is compatible with python 2 and 3, and should work on any Unix or Windows. Also, since it is implemented in a single file (~650 LOC) without dependencies, it should be easy to download and incorporate in a another project. Any feedback is appreciated -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
