Un-pythons a python subprocess command+arguments list back into CLI-friendly form.

Python scripts that deal with subprocess module usually need to prepare a list of string arguments for use with subprocess.run() (or similar). Sometimes you need to perform some quick n' dirty print() debugging to inspect the contents of that list. Or you may observe such lists being printed in production system logs. Any case, you might want to run the underlying command manually to verify whether it works as expected. But now you have to somehow "peel off" the pythonic list notation so that you can run the underlying command in a terminal.

You might get away doing the massaging by hand, although that becomes really annoying really fast. And it is also very error prone; you need to know how to handle spaces and quotation correctly. Not fun.

You could, of course, use the built-in shlex module to convert the list into CLI-safe form before printing. That's what this tool does too. However, sometimes the code that does the printing might be outside of your control...

Alternatively, you can use this tool for doing the conversion for you automatically. You only need to copy-paste the command list into the interactive prompt, and you will receive a valid, CLI-friendly command string in return :)

As you might notice, the functionality of this tool is rather simple; the goal of this repo is to provide the functionality in an easily installable package (especially if you use pipx).

$ pip install --user git+https://github.com/MawKKe/unpython

I recommend using pipx:

$ pipx install git+https://github.com/MawKKe/unpython

just make sure that pipx is configured correctly (i.e. installed programs are available in your $PATH).

Run the program , then copy-paste your python list object into the prompt:

$ unpython
...
>>> ['ls', '-l', 'foo/bar with spaces']

now it should print

ls -l 'foo/bar with spaces'

You can then copy this output into a terminal to run your command the usual way. The unpython should handle quotation etc. correctly for you.

Copyright 2024 Markus Holmström (MawKKe)

The works under this repository are licenced under Apache License 2.0. See file LICENSE for more information.

This project is hosted at https://github.com/MawKKe/unpython

You are welcome to leave bug reports, fixes and feature requests. Thanks!