Python Scripts as a Replacement for Bash Utility Scripts

Often in Python scripts that are used on the command line, arguments are used to give users options when they run a certain command. For instance, the head command takes a -n argument that takes the number following it and prints only that number of lines. Each argument that is provided to a Python script is exposed through the sys.argv array, which can be accessed by first importing sys. The code below shows how to take single words as arguments. This program is a simple adder, which takes two number arguments and adds them, and prints that out to the user. However, this format of taking in command-line arguments is rather basic. It is easy to make mistakes—for instance, pass two strings, such as hello and world, to this command, and you will start to get errors:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import sys

if __name__ == "__main__":
    # The first argument of sys.argv is always the filename,
    # meaning that the length of system arguments will be
    # more than one, when command-line arguments exist.
    if len(sys.argv) > 2:
            num1 = long(sys.argv[1])
            num2 = long(sys.argv[2])
            print "This command takes two arguments and adds them"
            print "Less than two arguments given."
    print "%s" % str(num1 + num2)

Thankfully, Python has a number of modules to deal with command-line arguments. My personal favorite is OptionParser. OptionParser is part of the optparse module that is provided by the standard library. OptionParser allows you to do a range of very useful things with command-line arguments:

  • Specify a default if a certain argument is not provided.

  • It supports both argument flags (either present or not) and arguments with values (-n 10000).

  • It supports different formats of passing arguments—for example, the difference between -n=100000 and -n 100000.

Let's use the OptionParser to enhance the sending-mail script. The original script had a lot of variables hard-coded into place, such as the SMTP details and the users' login credentials. In the code provided below, command-line arguments are used to pass in these variables:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import smtplib
import sys

from optparse import OptionParser

def initialize_smtp_server(smtpserver, smtpport, email, pwd):
    This function initializes and greets the SMTP server.
    It logs in using the provided credentials and returns the
    SMTP server object as a result.
    smtpserver = smtplib.SMTP(smtpserver, smtpport)
    smtpserver.login(email, pwd)
    return smtpserver

def send_thank_you_mail(email, smtpserver):
    to_email = email
    from_email = GMAIL_EMAIL
    subj = "Thanks for being an active commenter"
    # The header consists of the To and From and Subject lines
    # separated using a newline character.
    header = "To:%s\nFrom:%s\nSubject:%s \n" % (to_email,
            from_email, subj)
    # Hard-coded templates are not best practice.
    msg_body = """
    Hi %s,

    Thank you very much for your repeated comments on our service.
    The interaction is much appreciated.

    Thank You.""" % email
    content = header + "\n" + msg_body
    smtpserver.sendmail(from_email, to_email, content)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    usage = "usage: %prog [options]"
    parser = OptionParser(usage=usage)
    parser.add_option("--email", dest="email",
            help="email to login to smtp server")
    parser.add_option("--pwd", dest="pwd",
            help="password to login to smtp server")
    parser.add_option("--smtp-server", dest="smtpserver",
            help="smtp server url", default="")
    parser.add_option("--smtp-port", dest="smtpserverport",
            help="smtp server port", default=587)
    options, args = parser.parse_args()

    if not ( or options.pwd):
            parser.error("Must provide both an email and a password")

    smtpserver = initialize_smtp_server(options.stmpserver,
            options.smtpserverport,, options.pwd)

    # for every line of input.
    for email in sys.stdin.readlines():
            send_thank_you_mail(email, smtpserver)

This script shows the usefulness of OptionParser. It provides a simple, easy-to-use interface for command-line arguments, allowing you to define certain properties for each command-line option. It also allows you to specify default values. If certain arguments are not provided, it allows you to throw specific errors.

So what have you learned? Instead of replacing a series of bash commands with one Python script, it often is better to have Python do only the heavy lifting in the middle. This allows for more modular and reusable scripts, while also tapping into the power of all that Python offers. Using stdin as a file object allows Python to read input, which is piped to it from other commands, and writing to stdout allows it to continue passing the information through the piping system. Combining information like this can make for some very powerful programs. The examples I have given here are all for a fictional service that logs to a file.

As a real-world example, recently I have been working with gigabytes of CSV files that I have been converting using a Python script to a file that contains SQL commands to insert the information. To understand the sort of data I'm concerned with here, I ran the data for a single table, and the script took 23 hours to execute and generated an SQL file that was 20GB in size. The advantage of using a Python script in the fashion described in this article is that the whole file does not need to be read into memory. This means that an entire 20GB+ file can be processed one line at a time. Also it is easier to think about a problem when each step (reading, sorting, manipulation and writing) is separated into these logical steps. The guarantee that each of these commands, which are part of the core utilities of UNIX-like environment, is efficient and stable helps the entire experience to be more stable and secure.

The other benefit is that there is no hard-coded file that is read in. Often having the flexibility to pass it strings rather than the concept of files is very powerful. For instance, if 20,000 lines through a certain file, the script breaks, instead of re-running the script from the start, tail can be used to read only from the line on which the script failed.

There are a lot of aspects to Python in the shell that go beyond the scope of this article, such as the os module and the subprocess module. The os module is a standard library function that holds a lot of key operating system-level operations, such as listing directories and stating files, along with an excellent submodule os.path that deals with normalizing directories paths. The subprocess module allows Python programs to run system commands and other advanced operations, such as handling piping as described above within Python code between spawned processes. Both of these libraries are worth checking out if you intend to do any Python shell scripting.


Richard Delaney is a software engineer with Demonware Ireland. Richard works on back-end Web services using Python and the Django Web framework. He has been an avid Linux user and evangelist for the past five years.


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Perl is used that way for DECADES, pretty hany with it perl -ne 'print' way of calling.
This is one of the few cases where perl is much handy that python.

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Wow! The article topic is about how difficult it is to interpret shell scripts and then renders, yet another convoluted syntactical language. The problem with most script languages are that, they lack strict programming semantics. Granted most newbie programmers are educated using C++, which is main hype around Python, but the real problem of simplicity, isn't being resolved. If a language offers a multitude of ways to code, it forces the programmer to open a book again. How many programmers can honestly say, they are fluent in all high/low level languages? I suggest to you that "C" is the basic language we all know and that, TCL is the most compatible syntactically, is shell universal, not to mention strict and simple. It has all the good qualities of a scripting language, an interpreter (type tclsh), can be used on a shell command line to pipe with other shell commands, has a good GUI package/s, has a great debugger, not to mention adheres to strict syntactical rules. The problem with programmers these days are that they forget the KISS philosophy.

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AWK as a half-way solution

Magic Banana's picture

As other readers mention, the proper solution is:
$ sort names.log | uniq -c

Anyway, one often needs some more complicated processing and AWK really is a fantastic language to effectively process text files. It is a mix between the Shell (with $i as the ith field, pipes, redirection, etc.), C (variables, arithmetic, hash maps, loops, etc.) and sed (line matching w.r.t. regexps, functions implementing the sed's 's' command, etc.). The command above becomes, in AWK:
$ awk '{ ++names[$0] }
END { for (name in names) print name, names[name] }' names.log

Pretty straightforward, isn't it?

tiny bug

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Felipe's picture

UNIX/Linux is all about choices. I pick between Python and Bash all the time (with a sprinking of awk). The more serious the task or the more likely the script will have a long life, the more likely it is that I will use Python.

The one thing I will say to support the shell and pipes approach is how easy it is to incrementally debug your work. At any step, replacing the remainder of the pipeline with more gives you a quick way to see how you are doing. While tossing in print statements in Python is not hard, it just is more typing.

Depending on your programming knowledge, the right approach for you will probably be different. But, that said, if you are building something that is not write-only (that is, write the code, run it and throw it away) picking a scripting language such as Python or Ruby will generally pay off in the long run.

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Excelent article. I will be

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Excelent article. I will be using more Python in bash soon.

why not +x it's picture

No need to pipe to "python", just make sure you have the hashbang in your .py file, chmod it executable, then you can pipe your file directly to "":

cat nameslog |

Would seem a bit more elegant to me.

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anonymous's picture

I recently made the leap into python programming and I have to say that it is a easy language to use. Forcing code structure in a language was pure genious if you ask me.

I like the fact that core "modules" are included out of the box helps when you need to write a program that must function across hundreds of linux servers. You don't have this luxury with Perl. Using yum or aptget on servers with different OS patch levels, or lacking internet connections, firewall issues, etc is too much of a headache.
Shell scripting can be a pain too depending on what shell you are using (Bash, Korn, etc) and the personal preferences of the admin responsible for that box. The minute differences in syntax can cause hours of troubleshooting due to spaces, braces, brackets, character case...

Python is defintely a great tool to use if you need to write scipts/programs that must be used widely and interpreted by many.

I see the point in showing

Anonymous's picture

I see the point in showing the use of piping, but "cat names.log | sort | uniq" is dumb: it's the same as "sort -u names.log".

Hey of course you are

Richy Delaney's picture

Hey of course you are right,

this was written only to illustrate piping.

Often I find it easier to chain a ton of commands together rather than rememeber each flag for each binary. Even still, your idea is cleaner and better.

python -s

Roberto S.'s picture

I often use Perl with "-e", so I can hack quick snippets of code that do the work easier than some shell scripting. The same is possible in Python, using "python -s". Like:

cat blabla.log | python -s 'import sys; a= ... ;' | less

Which is handier, IMHO, than writing a file for things that you'll use only once or twice.


Anonymous's picture

Use Ruby. Trust me, it's much better than Python! And since Ruby 1.9, it's faster, too, as the default interpreter has changed from the MRI to YARV.

Though honestly, for most things, shell scripts are easier to write than scrips in full-blown programming languages (and the line between programming and scripting is getting increasingly blurred)...

could be done in one line with perl

Anonymous's picture

without even writing a script, using "perl -ne"

sort -u

Anonymous's picture

$ cat names.log | sort | uniq | wc -l


Are you trying to make things look complicated?

sort -u names.log | wc -l

is all you need.

Hey, Thanks for reading the

Richy Delaney's picture


Thanks for reading the article.

sort -u names.log | wc -l

is certainly a nicer way to write that, however it is the way it is in the article for a number of reasons. First I wanted to illustrate piping.

Also, I would mention that "sort -u" seems a little less clear to me than "sort | uniq"

as a result I would be inclined to go for the later. You will find in a lot of the bsd operating systems, the unix commands have less command line arguments.


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Command line argument options

Anonymous's picture

Not to be snarky, but regarding "You will find in a lot of the bsd operating systems, the unix commands have less command line arguments.":

This site is, is it not?

One would think the articles are geared towards the Linux, and not any *nix, community. It doesn't hurt to revise an article after it's been published, especially when it'll remain published indefinitely.

If using shortened switches clouds readability, one may always resort to the longer switches, e.g., --unique rather than -u for the sort command.

uniq -c

Hermann Schwärzler's picture

Thank you for this article. It was really interesting. I am planning to consider python the next time I am going to write a shell-script.

But for the records: You write on Page 1

The uniq command simply removes duplicates but gives no information on how many duplicates there are.

If you use uniq -c the output will be the same as with your every unique value is preceded by the number of its occurrences.


You can try install IPython

Anonymous's picture

You can try install IPython for shell, it very easy

Another cool feature i used

kle_py's picture

Another cool feature i used some time ago is
i could build and test my script in windows, then copy it over to a Linux/Unix box and it worked the same way ;)