How to do regular BASH work in Python?

[Frantisek Malina]

What is the best way to do the regular bash commands in native python?

- create directory
- create file
- make a symlink
- copy a file to another directory
- move a file
- set permissions

I need to write a program that creates real application/FTP accounts
and make regular backups to external disk and I think its best to do
it all consistently with my application in Python.
This way I can easily link it to the customer database and front-end
web application. I'd want to avoid BASH/SHELL if that's possible.

 

[Frantisek Malina]

Hey,
I found it. Python rocks:
http://www.python.org/doc/2.5.2/lib/os-file-dir.html

If you have any further links that provide some lively code examples
and recipes, please pass them on.

Thank you

Frank Malina
http://vizualbod.com

 

[jdd]

Hey,
I found it. Python rocks:http://www.python.org/doc/2.5.2/lib/os-file-dir.html

If you have any further links that provide some lively code examples
and recipes, please pass them on.

Thank you

Frank Malinahttp://vizualbod.com

http://examples.oreilly.com/python3/ has some good examples, although
they may be a little tough to read through if you don't have a copy of
"programming python", the book they're from.

 

[Frank Malina]

http://examples.oreilly.com/python3/has some good examples, although
they may be a little tough to read through if you don't have a copy of
"programming python", the book they're from.

Coming form PHP, I find Python is pleasure to read no matter what.

 

[Chris Rebert]

You might also be interested in the 'shutil' module:
http://docs.python.org/library/shutil.html#module-shutil

Cheers,
Chris

 

[Michael Torrie]

What is the best way to do the regular bash commands in native python?

- create directory
- create file
- make a symlink
- copy a file to another directory
- move a file
- set permissions

I need to write a program that creates real application/FTP accounts
and make regular backups to external disk and I think its best to do
it all consistently with my application in Python.
This way I can easily link it to the customer database and front-end
web application. I'd want to avoid BASH/SHELL if that's possible.

As others have said, the os and shutils modules should fulfill most of
your needs.

But unfortunately Python is definitely not a shell-scripting language
and some things that are easy in bash are really, really hard in python,
such as interacting with and stringing together processes, redirecting
outputs, etc. Whereas in bash it's easy to create pipes between
processes and redirect inputs with '|', '>', '2>', etc, in Python you'd
have to use the subprocess module to spawn a real shell to do much of
that.

In many circumstances, though, the purpose of the piping and redirection
in Bash is to do text processing, which is very easy to do with python
and generators. See http://www.dabeaz.com/generators/ for the real
power that python can bear on the problems traditionally solved with
bash. I find that in most cases in python, a simple wrapper around
subprocess to run a command and get its stdout, stderr and return error
code works pretty well.

 

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

But unfortunately Python is definitely not a shell-scripting language
and some things that are easy in bash are really, really hard in

python ...

Why not combine the two
<http://groups.google.co.nz/group/nz.comp/msg/3a572e757bbdd816>.