extcmd - subprocess with advanced output processing


This rather elaborate example shows a few interesting features of the library.
Each line of the called command is passed to a Chain delegate, there are three
copies made, the two first are just passed to another delegate while the last
is modified with a Transform delegate. Finally all copies end up in our sink
which is a composition of a simple Transform that prepends the stream name and
a Redirect that, by default, just writes each line back to the corresponding
stream.

Everything is encapsulated in a single module, extcmd
>>> import extcmd
>>> import re

Create our sink object, it will simply write stuff back to the right stream
while prepending the stream name to each line for easy inspection (and fun)
>>> sink = extcmd.Transform(lambda stream_name, line: "{0}: {1}".format(stream_name, line),
...                         extcmd.Redirect())
>>> better_subprocess = extcmd.ExternalCommandWithDelegate(
...     extcmd.Chain([
...         sink,  # pass one copy directly to the sink
...         sink,  # pass second copy directly to the sink
...         # transform a third copy with regular expression
...         extcmd.Transform(lambda stream_name, line: re.sub("hello", "bye", line, flags=re.I), sink),
...     ])
... )

After constructing that chain we can just call commands. As in subprocess there
is also check_call() which raises an exception on failure.
>>> returncode = better_subprocess.call(['echo', 'Hello World'])
stdout: Hello World
stdout: Hello World
stdout: bye World

You can still look at returncode, it is returned from each call()
>>> returncode
0
