shell-source 0.1.1

A python module for sourcing variables from shell scripts

python-shell-source

A python module for sourcing variables from shell scripts.

Installation

$ pip install shell-source

Documentation

The full documentation is available here

Usage

This module provides a function source which attempts to mimic the shell's source command.

The purpose of this function is to allow you to run a shell script which sets either environment variables or local variables, and then give you access to those variables. Normally this is not a straght-forward task, but this function achieves it by running the script in its intended shell then injecting commands to the shell to print its local variables and its environment variables. Finally it collects the shell's stdout and parses it to return to you with exactly the data you asked for.

Basic Usage

If you just pass a script and an interpreter you'll get back all the environment variables and local variables visible to and set by the script.

>>> from shell_source import source
>>> variables = source("path/to/script.sh", "bash")
>>> # It returns a dictionary of local and environment variables known by the script.
>>> variables
{"USER": "abraham", "PATH": "/bin:/usr/bin", ..., "foo": "bar"}

Requesting Specific Variables

If you specify the argument variables, then only those variables you passed will be present as keys in the returned dictionary.

>>> source("path/to/script.sh", "csh", variables=("foo", "bar", "biz"))
{"foo": ..., "bar": ..., "biz", ...}

Ignoring Local Variables

If you don't want to obtain any local variables set by the script, but only want the environment variables, you can pass ignore_locals=True.

Supporting Different Shells

This module has been tested to work with bash, zsh, csh, tcsh, ksh, and fish. You can use any other shell that's somewhat posix compliant and supports the keyword "source", but it it doesn't work, you may use the ShellConfig class to indicate to source how to interact with your shell.

The class ShellConfig contains several string templates which are used to run the necessary commands with the shell. If the shell you want to use doesn't support any of the commands set by default in that class, you can pass an instance of ShellConfig to source to override the default templates.

For example, imagine you have a strange shell that uses @foo instead of $foo to get the value of the variable foo, and that redirects the output of a command like this:

$ redirect 'echo hello' to /path/to/file

You would call source like this to tell it how to interact with your shell:

source(
	"path/to/script.sh",
	"myshell",
	shell_config=ShellConfig(
		redirect_stdout="redirect '{cmd}' to {file}",
		get_var="@{var}",
	)
)