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Shellingham: Tool to Detect Surrounding Shell
.. image:: https://img.shields.io/pypi/v/shellingham.svg
:target: https://pypi.org/project/shellingham/
Shellingham detects what shell the current Python executable is running in.
Usage
.. code-block:: python
>>> import shellingham
>>> shellingham.detect_shell()
('bash', '/bin/bash')
detect_shell
pokes around the process's running environment to determine
what shell it is run in. It returns a 2-tuple:
- The shell name, always lowercased.
- The command used to run the shell.
ShellDetectionFailure
is raised if detect_shell
fails to detect the
surrounding shell.
Notes
- The shell name is always lowercased.
- On Windows, the shell name is the name of the executable, minus the file
extension.
Notes for Application Developers
Remember, your application's user is not necessarily using a shell.
Shellingham raises ShellDetectionFailure
if there is no shell to detect,
but your application should almost never do this to your user.
A practical approach to this is to wrap detect_shell
in a try block, and
provide a sane default on failure
.. code-block:: python
try:
shell = shellingham.detect_shell()
except shellingham.ShellDetectionFailure:
shell = provide_default()
There are a few choices for you to choose from.
- The POSIX standard mandates the environment variable
SHELL
to refer to
"the user's preferred command language interpreter". This is always available
(even if the user is not in an interactive session), and likely the correct
choice to launch an interactive sub-shell with. - A command
sh
is almost guaranteed to exist, likely at /bin/sh
, since
several POSIX tools rely on it. This should be suitable if you want to run a
(possibly non-interactive) script. - All versions of DOS and Windows have an environment variable
COMSPEC
.
This can always be used to launch a usable command prompt (e.g. cmd.exe
on
Windows).
Here's a simple implementation to provide a default shell
.. code-block:: python
import os
def provide_default():
if os.name == 'posix':
return os.environ['SHELL']
elif os.name == 'nt':
return os.environ['COMSPEC']
raise NotImplementedError(f'OS {os.name!r} support not available')