[Python-ideas] shutil.runret and shutil.runout

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Serhiy Storchaka writes:

 > Yes, I want this in Python:
 > 
 > readall(cmd('cut -d: -f3 $file', file='/etc/passwd') | cmd('sort -n') | cmd('tail -n5'))
 > 
 > or
 > 
 > cmd('cut', '-d:', '-f3', '/etc/passwd').pipe('sort', '-n').pipe('tail', '-n5').readlines()
 > 
 > or something similar.

But you can already do

    sorted([l.split(":")[2] for l in open('/etc/passwd')])[-5:]

(and I don't really care whether you were being ironic or not; either
way that one-liner is an answer<wink/>).

Actually, I wrote that off the top of my head and it almost worked.
The problem I ran into is that I'm on a Mac, and there was a bunch of
cruft comments (which don't contain any colons) in the beginning of
the file.  So I got a list index out of range when accessing the split
line.  In this case, cut | sort | tail would produce the expected
output.  But cut | sort | head would just produce garbage (the leading
comments in sorted order).  So the failure modes differ.  It might be
useful for people used to shell failure modes.