[jvanderbot]

Well they all do, but in terms of ease of use, tar and zip are much simpler to implement in a cli pipeline than to write bespoke code. At least that has been my experience.

[jerf]

It is hard to compete with "| gzip" in any programming language. Just importing a library and you're already well past that. Just typing "import" and you're tied! Overbudget if I drop the space in "| gzip".

This is one of the reasons why, for all its faults, shell just isn't going anywhere any time soon.

[deathanatos]

It is hard to compete with.

You can also (assuming your language supports it), execute gzip, and assuming your language gives you some writable-handle to the pipe, then write data into it. So, you get the concurrency "for free", but you don't have to go all the way to "do all of it in process".

I've also done the "trick" of executing [bash, -c, <stuff>] in a higher language, too. I'd personally rather see the work better suited for the high language done in the higher language, but if shell is easier, then as such it is.

It's sort of like unsafe blocks: minimize the shell to a reasonable portion, clearly define the inputs/outputs, and make sure you're not vulnerable to shell-isms, as best as you can, at the boundary.

But I still think I see the reverse far more often. Like, `steam` is … all the time, apparently … exec'ing a shell to then exec … xdg-user-dir? (And the error seems to indicate that that's it…) Which seems more like the sort of "you could just exec this yourself?". (But Steam is also mostly a web-app of sorts, so, for all I know there's JS under there, and I think node is one of those "makes exec(2) hard/impossible" langs.)

[jvanderbot]

import os import os.subprocess #is that right? subprocess.execute(f'tar cvzf t.tar.gz {' '.join(list_of_files)}')

Did I do that right?

or was it

`tar cvzf t.tar.gz *`

[Joker_vD]

    import subprocess

    subprocess.run(['tar', 'cvzf', 't.tar.gz', *list_of_files])

or indeed

    import os, subprocess

    subprocess.run(['tar', 'cvzf', 't.tar.gz', *(f.path for f in os.scandir('.'))])

if you need files from the current directory