Saner Bash Commands Inside Python

As great as Python is, sometimes the dev's make really weird decisions regarding defaults. A perfect example is running shell commands inside Python 3+. For some reason the dev thought it was a good idea to make the subprocess "run" method _not_ capture the output from stdout or stderr by default. I find this incredibly annoying and it constantly result in me having to look up the syntax since I always forget it.

I decided to instead have this little helper function to encapsulate what I consider to be saner defaults. I decode the bytes into utf8 since thats the output for 99% of all bash commands.

#!/usr/bin/env python3
import subprocess

def run_cmd(cmd):
    result = subprocess.run(cmd, shell=True, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE)
    result.stdout = result.stdout.decode('utf8')
    result.stderr = result.stderr.decode('utf8')
    return result

Running that function will execute whatever command you pass it (insecure, but use it appropriately) and returns an object that you can then check the return code, stdout, and stderr.

So now, it's just:

In [25]: if 'root' in run_cmd('whoami').stdout:
   ....:             print("you are root")
   ....:
you are root