TOSS: Throw Out (Your) Shell Scripts

Contents:

• Top 100 Bash Questions on Stack Overflow
  • 1-10
  • 11-20
  • 21-30
  • 31-40
  • 41-50
  • 51-60
• Packages
  • Argument Parsing: Click
  • Argument Parsing: docopt
  • Remote Execution: Fabric3
  • Remote Execution: Fabric 2.x
  • Jobs: Invoke
  • Flair: Colorama

The Competitors

Bash: The Language

One base type: character strings. Arrays available, but as Unix commands are all about chaining them together with pipes, newline- or null-delimited “arrays” are more common as those can be interpreted by other commands.

Shell strengths: process forking, stream management Shell weaknesses: types, logic, syntax

If you need to pipe…

Where needed, you can stitch together multiple processes…

PowerShell

Has types, interactive help, all-in-all pretty nice. Only available on Windows.

Primary Uses

• Wholesale replacement of scripts. The scripts may be direct shell scripts or Makefiles. Common script usage:

  • Tie together multiple executables
  • Perform a bunch of file/path manipulations

• Wrapping a confusing/awful interface to another program

  • os.exec* functions if you want to just do something at the start
  • The program may also be ordinarily fine, but say you wanted to run it several times with different parameters, or save a set of parameters as a default.

The standard library packages in Python that can replicate much of the basic functionality that shell scripts generally provide are the os, pathlib, shutil, and subprocess packages.

Indices and tables

• Index
• Module Index
• Search Page