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by thewhitetulip
2312 days ago
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I love Python, I am a Python trainer and wrote an into book on it. But few years ago, I finally learnt how to use shell and it blew my mind. With a single command, I can split a really large files in 100 based on a particular column or I can aggregate and do whatever I want with a few piped commands, preview any file with sed '3p' file Sure. I do not write 100lines of awk code, but I believe I have started utilizing some potential of bash and I don't anymore fire up Python shell and write ten lines which then someone has to maintain! In my org, our Program manager discovered Python and he looks to replace entire unix scripts whoch do exactly what they are required to do, never fail and will work without any changes to Python. I don't understand that. I don't want Python to "win" because there are things you can do in bash, if you learn it correctly |
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I have a workflow I maintain, it takes an image from a file path or a url, converts the image to 2-bit color, adds control codes, and sends the job to the printer - and there were two other utilities did various calibration options for the printer.
So, originally it was written in python2, and used an IPP library that didnt make the leap to python3, so I ported the 'core' (downloading the image, and processing it, and adding the needed control codes) part of the job to python3, and then wrote a bash wrapper to run this script, and pipe the output to lp, it also uses $PIPESTATUS to provide intelligent error codes back to the calling application.
When I approached this, I realized that I could have ported the whole thing to bash, but the more I thought about it I realized it'd probably have greater overhead. First I'd have to run the script, then curl, then next imagemagick (which has its own issues), then insert the formatting around the image, and then run lp. I looked at it and figured python has lower overhead to do all of these things, as everything but the image handling is part of the python standard library.
There were two other scripts however, that all they do is output a bunch of strings, and send them to be printed, these were also python2 and used IPP, these however I just reimplemented in bash, and send the jobs directly to cups.
My attitude is use whatever language you feel comfortable with to accomplish the task, you can do serious programming in bash - people are incredulous at this, but the basic unix toolset is so powerful, you can do almost anything with it.