![]() However, this same reliance on operating system utilities makes shell scripts somewhat less portable than Python. A tool that can “script” tasks they’d otherwise type by hand is a substantial win for this community. ![]() System Administrators are often great fans and experts in shell scripting. Still, unless you do it in the Windows Subsystem for Linux, you may need several other Linux utilities to “port” a Bash script successfully. For example, Bash is easy enough to run on Windows. But generally speaking, shell scripts work best as glue for other operating system utilities. This definition is not exact because Bash has been ported to Windows, and you can even run PowerShell from a Mac or Linux machine. However, that command line “shell” can run inside a graphical user interface as a “terminal window.” So we don’t usually use “shell” to refer to a graphical user interface. This interface can be anything, really, but generally, what we mean by a system shell is a command-line program. A shell is simply a tool that provides an abstract or high-level interface to an operating system. To better understand this, let’s first discuss what a shell is, which will help us understand what shell scripts are and where they excel. Advertisements The Strengths of Shell Scripts However, Python does allow you to easily create simple and readable scripts that will work across different platforms. Strictly speaking, Python is not a shell programming language, so it does not create shell scripts in the same sense as Bash scripts, batch files, or PowerShell scripts. With that brief introduction out of the way, let’s dive right in! Is Python Good for Shell Scripting? What Python Shells have good support for working with the system shell?.How can I run external programs from Python?.What Python runtime libraries do we need for shell programming?.Is Python good for shell scripting, or must I use Bash, the “native” shell language?.How can we accomplish some of the things in Python that we can also do in Bash?.What we want to understand are topics like these: We want to spend some time comparing them, but our goal is broader. However, for all the surface similarities, Bash and Python differ in many important ways. It’s revealing that even Python’s detractors acknowledge that it has excellent support for tasks one can otherwise use Bash or another Linux / Unix shell to accomplish. So there is a lot of overlap between the two. Additionally, Python lets you choose between running a file with your program’s statements or working interactively at the command line. Like Bash, Python enables you to work quickly and to run scripts without a separate (manual) compile step. On the other hand, those who hate it may tell you it’s “just a scripting language.” Advertisements They’ll also say it supports many use cases, including back support for back-end web development, data science, cloud programming, and more. If you ask developers about Python, those who love it may tell you that it’s a powerful, object-oriented, multi-purpose language.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |