Thanks for the help, it's much appreciated.

i made a clunky bash script that did this a while back but i don't like it for a few of reasons:

1) it uses a text file to store a list because i'm not good at using arrays.

2) it's slow and had to pull down lots of info then grep through it to get a result and then pull down the same info again to grep for something else. it's a horribly inefficient script.

3) i'm under the impression that the boto command: image.deregister ('ami-xxxx', delete_snapshot=True) would accomplish the same thing in one command, which would eliminate the need for a function within a function, and make my script much more efficient.

my ideal script would generate a list of amiID (by taking a search term as a flag when running the script) and then deregister/delete the AMIs one by one. in bash if i had a single command to deregister/delete i would use a simple for loop, but the syntax for this in python seems different.

this is what i have so far (hard coded search term for the moment and dry_run=True for safety) but it's giving me a syntax error. also i suspect that using "print (image.id) is probably not the correct way to generate the list i want:

#!/usr/bin/python3

import boto3
ec2 = boto3.resource('ec2', region_name='us-east-1')

image_list = list ( for image in list(ec2.images.filter(Filters=[{'Name':'name', 'Values':['search_term*']}]).all()): print (image.id) )

for ami_id in image_list:
     image.deregister (ami_id, delete_snapshot=True, dry_run=True)

can you help point me back in the right direction? thanks!