Explanation for newbies:

  • Shell is the programming language that you use when you open a terminal on linux or mac os. Well, actually “shell” is a family of languages with many different implementations (bash, dash, ash, zsh, ksh, fish, …)

  • Writing programs in shell (called “shell scripts”) is a harrowing experience because the language is optimized for interactive use at a terminal, not writing extensive applications

  • The two lines in the meme change the shell’s behavior to be slightly less headache-inducing for the programmer:

    • set -euo pipefail is the short form of the following three commands:
      • set -e: exit on the first command that fails, rather than plowing through ignoring all errors
      • set -u: treat references to undefined variables as errors
      • set -o pipefail: If a command piped into another command fails, treat that as an error
    • export LC_ALL=C tells other programs to not do weird things depending on locale. For example, it forces seq to output numbers with a period as the decimal separator, even on systems where coma is the default decimal separator (russian, dutch, etc.).

  • The title text references “posix”, which is a document that standardizes, among other things, what features a shell must have. Posix does not require a shell to implement pipefail, so if you want your script to run on as many different platforms as possible, then you cannot use that feature.

    • Lightfire228
      1·
      6 hours ago

      that is a little more complicated

      p.communicate() will take a string (or bytes) and send it to the stdin of the process, then wait for p to finish execution

      there are ways to stream input into a running process (without waiting for the process to finish), but I don’t remember how off the top of my head

      
from shutil import which
from subprocess import Popen, PIPE, run
from pathlib import Path

LS   = which('ls')
REV  = which('rev')

ls   = run([LS, Path.home()], stdout=PIPE)

p = Popen([REV], stdin=PIPE, stdout=PIPE)
stdout, stderr = p.communicate(ls.stdout)

print(stdout.decode('utf-8'))