Version 0.1.6 of Sarge, a cross-platform library which wraps the subprocess module in the standard library, has been released.

What changed? -------------

- Fixed #44: Added an optional timeout to Command.wait() and Pipeline.wait(), which   only takes effect on Python >= 3.3.

- Fixed #47: Added the ``replace_env`` keyword argument which allows a complete   replacement for ``os.environ`` to be passed.

- Fixed #51: Improved error handling around a Popen call.

What does Sarge do? -------------------

Sarge tries to make interfacing with external programs from your Python applications easier than just using subprocess alone.

Sarge offers the following features:

* A simple way to run command lines which allows a rich subset of Bash- style shell command syntax, but parsed and run by sarge so that you can run on Windows without cygwin (subject to having those commands available):

...

...

from sarge import capture_stdout p = capture_stdout('echo foo | cat; echo bar') for line in p.stdout: print(repr(line))

... 'foo\n' 'bar\n'

* The ability to format shell commands with placeholders, such that variables are quoted to prevent shell injection attacks.

* The ability to capture output streams without requiring you to program your own threads. You just use a Capture object and then you can read from it as and when you want.

* The ability to look for patterns in captured output and to interact accordingly with the child process.

Advantages over subprocess ---------------------------

Sarge offers the following benefits compared to using subprocess:

* The API is very simple.

* It's easier to use command pipelines - using subprocess out of the box often leads to deadlocks because pipe buffers get filled up.

* It would be nice to use Bash-style pipe syntax on Windows, but Windows shells don't support some of the syntax which is useful, like &&, ||, |& and so on. Sarge gives you that functionality on Windows, without cygwin.

* Sometimes, subprocess.Popen.communicate() is not flexible enough for one's needs - for example, when one needs to process output a line at a time without buffering the entire output in memory.

* It's desirable to avoid shell injection problems by having the ability to quote command arguments safely.

* subprocess allows you to let stderr be the same as stdout, but not the other way around - and sometimes, you need to do that.

Python version and platform compatibility -----------------------------------------

Sarge is intended to be used on any Python version >= 2.6 and is tested on Python versions 2.6, 2.7, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 3.7 and 3.8 on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X (not all versions are tested on all platforms, but sarge is expected to work correctly on all these versions on all these platforms).

Finding out more ----------------

You can read the documentation at

http://sarge.readthedocs.org/

There's a lot more information, with examples, than I can put into this post.

You can install Sarge using "pip install sarge" to try it out. The project is hosted on BitBucket at

https://bitbucket.org/vinay.sajip/sarge/

And you can leave feedback on the issue tracker there.

I hope you find Sarge useful!

Regards,

Vinay Sajip