execute shell command pipeline

[Paul]

Hi,

I'm a Python newbie and I'm wondering how I can do the following Perl thing:

open(F, 'grep -b 2004 logfile | head -1 | cut -d: -f1 |') or die "blah, blah";
$offset = <F>;
( or $offset = `grep -b 2004 logfile | head -1 | cut -d: -f1`; )

in Python. When I tried:

offset = os.popen('grep -b 2004 logfile | head -1 |cut -d: -f1').read()

I get a whole bunch of error messages --

grep: writing output: Broken pipe

Any help would be most appreciated.

Regards,

Paul

[Cameron Laird]

In article <87**************************@posting.google.com >,
Paul <Pa******@telus.com> wrote:

Hi,

I'm a Python newbie and I'm wondering how I can do the following Perl thing:

open(F, 'grep -b 2004 logfile | head -1 | cut -d: -f1 |') or die "blah, blah";
$offset = <F>;
( or $offset = `grep -b 2004 logfile | head -1 | cut -d: -f1`; )

in Python. When I tried:

offset = os.popen('grep -b 2004 logfile | head -1 |cut -d: -f1').read()

I get a whole bunch of error messages --

grep: writing output: Broken pipe

[Jeff Epler]

The Python library manual says (http://python.org/doc/lib/module-signal.html)
Python installs a small number of signal handlers by default: SIGPIPE
is ignored (so write errors on pipes and sockets can be reported as
ordinary Python exceptions) and SIGINT is translated into a
KeyboardInterrupt exception. All of these can be overridden.
In perl, or from the shell, grep is terminated by SIGPIPE. In Python,
grep ignores the signal because the "ignored" status of SIGPIPE is
inherited by the child process. Instead, it prints the error once for
each write that returns -EPIPE.

Jeff

[Mark McEahern]

Paul wrote:

Hi,

I'm a Python newbie and I'm wondering how I can do the following Perl thing:

open(F, 'grep -b 2004 logfile | head -1 | cut -d: -f1 |') or die "blah, blah";
$offset = <F>;
( or $offset = `grep -b 2004 logfile | head -1 | cut -d: -f1`; )

in Python. When I tried:

You don't have to do it this verbosely, but it works:

import os
text = '2004'
filename = 'logfile'
delim = ':'
matches = os.popen('grep -b %s %s' % (text, filename)).readlines()
if matches:
first = matches[0]
offset = first.split(delim)[0]
# note: offset is now a string

// m