shell-lib 2.0.0

A Python utility to simplify the writing of shell-like scripts.

Introduction

Documentation | Changelog | Repository

shell-lib is designed to simplify the writing of shell-like scripts:

• Python syntax: Write scripts in readable Python, freeing from complex shell command syntax.
• Reliable error handling: Use Python's exception to manage command failure. If a command fails, by default, it raises a subprocess.CalledProcessError exception. For commands that may fail, user can also only check the exit-code.
• Cross-platform compatibility: Write a single script that works across Linux, macOS, and Windows platforms.
• Rich ecosystem integration: Easily integrate with both the CLI tool and Python library ecosystems.
• Lightweight and portable: Only use Python standard library.
• Well tested: Consistent and reliable behavior on different platforms and Python versions.
• Friendly: Readers can understand the code without consulting the documentation. If writers use modern IDEs, then almost no need to consult the documentation.

It provides some functions that make writing shell-like scripts easy:

1. Executing external command: Conveniently invoke external commands.
2. File and directory operations: Provide a consistent and intuitive file system operations API, that clearly distinguish between file and directory operations.
3. User interactions: Do common interactions with one line of code.
4. Obtaining system information: Get common system information for shell-like scripts.

This module was co-created with Google Gemini.

Usage

#!/usr/bin/python3
from shell_lib import sh

PROJECT_PATH = "my_project"
FILE = "hello.txt"

sh.create_dir(PROJECT_PATH)
# sh.cd() context manager restores the previous working directory when
# exiting the code block, even if an exception raised within the code block.
with sh.cd(PROJECT_PATH):
    sh(f"echo 'Hello, World!' > {FILE}")
    print(f"File size: {sh.get_file_size(FILE)} bytes")
sh.remove_dir(PROJECT_PATH)

There is a demo script at the documentation page.