do python's nifty indentation rules spell the death of one-liners?

[A. Lloyd Flanagan]

Dan Jacobson <jidanni at dman.ddts.net> wrote in message news:<87he90b8rp.fsf at jidanni.org>...
> I need to use one liners every day, especially in Makefiles.  I thus
> need to know how to make any kind of python program into a big long one
> liner. However, right out of the starting gates I run into
> $ python -c 'print 2;for i in (1,4):print i'
>   File "<string>", line 1
>     print 2;for i in (1,4):print i
>               ^
> SyntaxError: invalid syntax
>
... 
> 
> This makes no output and returns no error value to the shell:
> $ python -c 'import math' -c 'for i in range(200,500,50): print
>   i,360/2/math.pi*math.asin(i/1238.4)'
...

You don't have to do these as one liners.

You can use a shell trick called a 'here document'.  It lets you put a
set of lines directly in the shell script, and pass them as input to a
program.  Here's an example:

#!/bin/ksh
python << EOF
y = 0
for i in range(10):
        y += i
        print i, y
EOF

The '<< EOF' tells the script to send everything to python until the
line that contains just EOF  (and you can use any label, not just
EOF).  So for your example:

python << DONE
print 2
for i in (1,4):
     print i
DONE

python << END_MATH
import math
for i in range(200,500,50):
     print i,360/2/math.pi*math.asin(i/1238.4)
END_MATH

These all worked fine on HP/UX 10, using korn shell, with python 2.1
(no snide remarks, please, I didn't choose the setup :).