System Commands

Utility to call any system command from python.

Import any program that's on your PATH from syscmd.cmds and you'll get a function that executes the program with the given positional arguments. By, default, the function uses subprocess.check_call to execute the program. But this can be changed by passing in one of syscmd.CALL, syscmd.CHECK_CALL, or syscmd.CHECK_OUTPUT as the f argument to your function to get the respective subprocess function. Expect the same behavior from the imported syscmd functions as the subprocess functions, eg. return value, standard in/out/error, etc.

In addition to the positional arguments and f, the imported functions also accept all the keyword arguments of the underlying subprocess functions.

Examples:

# Import various system commands
>>> from syscmd.cmds import echo, ls, true, false

# Run 'echo' with three positional arguments; stdout goes to stdout and the
# exit code is returned
>>> res = echo('one', 'two', 'three')
one two three
>>> print res
0

# Run 'ls' with no arguments
>>> res = ls()
AUTHORS.rst             MANIFEST.in             setup.cfg
CONTRIBUTING.rst        README.rst              setup.py
HISTORY.rst             docs                    syscmd
LICENSE                 requirements.txt        tox.ini

# Run 'ls' with the '-l' option on 'README.rst'
>>> res = ls('-l', 'README.rst')
-rw-r--r--  1 swillis  staff  1904 Apr 21 13:13 README.rst

# Run 'true'
>>> res = true()
>>> print res
0

# Run 'false'
>>> res = false()
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "syscmd/cmds.py", line 57, in _cmd
    return f(full_args, **full_kwargs)
  File "/usr/local/Cellar/python/2.7.9/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/subprocess.py", line 540, in check_call
    raise CalledProcessError(retcode, cmd)
subprocess.CalledProcessError: Command '('/usr/bin/false',)' returned non-zero exit status 1

# Uh-oh... a non-zero exit code raises an exception because it's run with
# 'subprocess.check_call'

# Import CALL from syscmd
>>> from syscmd import CALL
>>> res = false(f=CALL)

# Now running 'false' doesn't cause an exception, but we still get the exit
# code as the return value
>>> print res
1

• Free software: BSD license

Features

• TODO