Useful, robust shell utilities

Jonathan Gardner jgardn at alumni.washington.edu
Fri Mar 1 07:13:15 EST 2002


I tried to use the shutil module... and to tell you the truth, it stinks. 
Is there an effort to make a robust, useful shutil module that has the 
equivalent of the unix shell utilities?

I think it would be nice to make things like 'grep' even...

Here is my wish list. Each of these should implement a significant portion 
of what the GNU utils do. They should be robust, and give reasonable 
results, and reasonable exceptions.

touch, chmod, chown, chgrp, touch
df, du
cp, dd, install, mv, rm, shred

If there isn't an effort to make this, or if no one has done anything like 
this yet, I am willing to volunteer some time to do it. It would be really 
nice if they ended up being compatible with Windows and Macintosh - give 
them some powerful tools they didn't even know existed!

Jonathan









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