[jvanderbot]

My biggest annoyance is when I get some tooling from some other team, and they're like "oh just extend this Python script". It'll operate on local files, using shell commands, in a non-reentrant way, with only customization from commenting out code. Maybe there's some argparse but you end up writing a program using their giant args as primitives.

Guys just write small programs and chain them. The wisdom of the ancients is continuously lost.

[hiccuphippo]

Python comes with a built-in module called fileinput that makes this very easy. It checks sys.argv[1] and reads from it or from stdin if it's empty or a dash.

https://docs.python.org/3/library/fileinput.html

[anonymous-panda]

I would recommend the python sh module instead of writing bash for more complex code. Python’s devenv and tooling is way more mature and safer.

[dan_mctree]

It's just a preference thing, I loathe the small program chaining style and cannot work with it at all. Give me a python script and I'm good though. I can't for the life of me imagine why people would want to do pseudo programming through piping magic when chaining is so limited compared to actual programming

[samatman]

This is of course a false dichotomy, there's nothing pseudo about using bash (perhaps you mean sudo?) and bash scripts orchestrate what you call 'actual' programs.

I commonly write little python scripts to filter logs, which I have read from stdin. That means I can filter a log to stdout:

   cat logfile.log | python parse_logs.py

Or filter them as they're generated:

   tail -f logfile.log | python parse_logs.py

Or write the filtered output to a file:

   cat logfile.log | python parse_logs.py > filtered.log 

Or both:

   tail -f logfile.log | python parse_logs.py | tee filtered.log

It would be possible, I suppose, to configure a single python script to do all those things, with flags or whatever.

But who on Earth has the time for that?

[dgfitz]

Chaining pipes in python is quite obnoxious.