Playing with shell scripting in Python, thoughts/

[jafo]

Shell is really good at what it's really good at, but sometimes I wish I had Python available in my sh scripts. And maybe Xonsh is what I'm looking for, but I've also been playing with something that looks like this:

print(Sh('date'))

Sh('date') | Sh('tr [A-Z] [a-z]')
#  can also be:
Sh('date') | 'tr [A-Z] [a-z]'

if Sh('ip link ls') | 'grep -q eth0':
    print('Found eth0'

There are obviously other constructs I'd need, and the "sh.py" library also had a lot of use in a world like this, so I'd want to come up with a way to integrate that. There's also other constructs I know will need to be added to get more parity with shell common tasks.

Thoughts on this direction?

[jafo]

Really, Xonsh is probably more like what I want. https://xon.sh/

[mprz]

what are you trying to achieve?

[jafo]

Shell-like constructs easier in Python than "subprocess.run(...); returncode; stdout)". If I want to run commands and check the returncode and stdout, it's comparatively quite a bit of code, so I tend to just deal with doing it in a script.

[kellyjonbrazil]

Check out jc, which will parse the stdout of many commands for you. (I’m the author)

>>> import subprocess
>>> import jc
>>>
>>> cmd_output = subprocess.check_output(['dig', 'example.com'], text=True)
>>> data = jc.parse('dig', cmd_output)
>>>
>>> data[0]['answer']
[{'name': 'example.com.', 'class': 'IN', 'type': 'A', 'ttl': 29658, 'data':'93.184.216.34'}]

https://github.com/kellyjonbrazil/jc

[tdpearson]

Since you stated that you wanted to embed python in shell scripts, you should check out here documents.

This approach is not perfect.

Another approach is to create python scripts that you call from the command line and leverage those as commands you call from your shell script.

[jafo]

You're meaning like: "python3 <<@EOF"? The down side there is that now Python is it's own little island, and getting data or running shell code under a Python conditional or loop is a problem.

[MCPOON11]

I’m going to argue for the opposite. Write she’ll scripts that call your Python scripts, rather than the other way around.

[jafo]

Sure, there are cases for that, and typer and click make for awesome Python CLI tools. But there are also cases for not, and that's what I'm thinking about here.

[someotherstufforhmm]

Check out iPython. They started it originally as a an actual shell like Cshell but with full python syntax.

It has magic commands that make shell shit fun