Python as a default shell, replacement of bash, sh, cmd ?

Kyle T. Jones onexpadREMOVE at
Tue Feb 21 21:28:29 EST 2012

On 2/19/12 2:16 AM, SherjilOzair wrote:
> Well, if not modify python itself, I was thinking of making another shell, which borrows a lot from python, something like merging bash and python. such that I can do `cd ~/Desktop/dev` and `for i in open('file.txt'): print i` at the some shell. This I think would be VERY useful.

That's an awful lot of key mashing just to replace 'cat file.txt'

for i in big small upper lower ; do for j in conf bin log ; do chmod 
2755 /home/me/$i/$j ; done ; done

cat data.log | grep Error | awk -F, '{print $5, $1, $2,}' | sort


I believe your solution seeks a problem.  I also believe a tool that 
seeks to be all things generally does none of them particularly well.


> IPyhton is very good, but after all, it is just an advanced interpreter, not a default shell. I don't want this to run on top of bash or sh. But it should run on its own, at shell level.
> Bash and sh, according to me, have very ugly syntaxes and the general user does not even use those. Python put on the shell would be adhering to python's vision, i.e. bringing programming to the masses.
> The general user, who earlier could not do batch operations, and had to buy software and such for all that, could now write his open simple python script and run it in his shell that would do as he wants.
> Python on the shell could effectively remove learning grep, awk, sed, bash and the various unix utilities.
> Don't take me wrong. Those are awesome tools, and I use them. But the awesomeness is not experienced by the general UNIX user on mac or linux. Python could do that.
> We all know how great a programming language python is. Imagine being able to control your computer with such an elegant language. Imagine that I import some speech recognition utility on the terminal shell, and voila, I'm speaking to the computer and it is doing stuff on the terminal for me.
> Shell would give python raw power! And Python would manage it well.

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