[d0mine]

There are Plumbum shell combinators in Python http://plumbum.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

[voltagex_]

There are a couple of modules that do this kind of thing but Plumbum looks interesting, particularly

http://plumbum.readthedocs.org/en/latest/local_commands.html...

>from plumbum.cmd import cat

>>cat('tmp.txt') #invokes cat tmp.txt on the system