Python Command Line Tools

Chapter 5: Writing pure Bash or ZSH command-line tools

Alfredo Deza

I’ve been horrified before trying to figure out a piece of production code that was mixing shell scripting and Python. Why would one try to do something like this? A step further was when a large (and custom) Python test framework was doing a system call to a shell that then itself executed Python on a remote system. Can you imagine fixing bugs in that codebase? Where do you start? In the remote server running some odd version of Python, or using a previous version of BASH that has a built-in that behaves differently? Or perhaps in Python that can change some subtle things (like dictionary ordering) from one version to the other?

    writes = run(
        args=[
            'sudo', 'mkdir',