The idea: using the Python interpreter as an InteractiveShell.

Command execution

Use short method names:

   1 def S(arg):
   2   """returns string of executed command arg"""
   3   return os.popen(arg).read()
   4 
   5 def SN(arg):
   6   """returns list of executed command arg"""
   7   return os.popen(arg).read().split('\n')
   8 
   9 def SP(arg):
  10   """prints string of executed command arg"""
  11   print S(arg)
  12 
  13 def SNP(arg):
  14   """prints with lines list executed command arg"""
  15   for i in SN():
  16     print i

Command execution is the one thing an InteractiveShell has to be good at. Typing S("<command>") is too much overhead for command execution. Still, a mixture of bash style command execution and shell programming with Python would be great.

I'd want the simple style of command execution from bash available:

cd /foo/bar

But also the Python style for more complex commands:

os.setcwd('/foo/bar')

Some ways to execute the bash-style command:

• Use os.popen(<command>).

• Map all commands to Python functions: cd(), less(), all taking a list of strings as arguments.
• Completely separate bash-style commands from Python commands, executing it with bash.

-- JohannesGijsbers DateTime(2002-12-07T03:34:05)

Path manipulation

The os.path module provides a good set of functions for path manipulation, but you might also want to split the path at the root:

   1 import re
   2 def splitroot(s):
   3   if string.find(s,"/") == -1:
   4     return '',s
   5   if s[0] == '/':
   6     s = s[1:]
   7   m = re.match("(.*?)/(.*)$",s)
   8   return m.groups()

awk comparables

Simply use the re module. It's a fuller set of regular expressions. Create a wrapper function for a utility for this if you want call it inlinegrep.

Limitations

The killall function was rejected by the ["BDFL"]. As far as I can see from the previous version of this page, Guido rejected it because it isn't in POSIX. I couldn't find any references on this in the mailing list archives. Anyone?