script to filter python files

[Skaperen]

i was doing this in grep a lot so i made this little script and put it at /usr/local/bin/pygrep.

pygrep

#!/usr/bin/env python3
from os import execvp
from sys import argv
execvp('egrep',['egrep','\.py$']+argv[1:])

so now i use the script a lot.

[micseydel]

Could you elaborate on the benefit(s) of this?

[Ofnuts]

Also curious... and why not an alias anyway.

[Skaperen]

Could you elaborate on the benefit(s) of this?

i, personally, scan for files a lot with pipelines to work with very large lists (i currently have around 6000000 files in the /home directories.  filtering specific file types makes for faster content searches and gives me less noise.

for many people, there may be no benefit at all.

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Also curious... and why not an alias anyway.

it could have been an alias.  but i have many times run into cases where filtering file paths like this is not running under a shell, or initializing the shell to have all my aliases (there would be many if i did this as aliases or shell functions) is not always practical.  i have done many of these as shell scripts and they are under my working plans to convert most shell scripts to python3.  when i write new scripts, now, i try to do them in python3 first, falling back to python2, pike, awk, bash and C (in that order) if there are problems (had one, once, but re-did it in python3 later).  simple aliase-like commands like this are trivial and have never had problems.

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i just rewrote it to take symlinks for many languages/extension:

grepext

#!/usr/bin/env python3
from os import execvp
from sys import argv
execvp('egrep',['egrep','\.'+argv[0].split('/')[-1].split('grep')[0]+'$']+argv[1:])

then i did:

ln -fsv grepext /usr/local/bin/pygrep

and some others.  symlinks still take filesystem space and cache memory so there is still no real gain.