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The other day a coworker asked me to look at a python script he’d written - make sure there weren’t any major issues ( “little ones are ok” - his words). One thing that immediately jumped out at me was how it was handling exit-on-error print >> sys . stderr , "Something went wrong. Exiting..." sys . exit ( 1 ) Aside from the very retro print >> syntax, compare with this typical bash snippet echo…

The other day a coworker asked me to look at a python script he’d written - make sure there weren’t any major issues (“little ones are ok” - his words).

One thing that immediately jumped out at me was how it was handling exit-on-error

print >> sys.stderr, "Something went wrong. Exiting..."
sys.exit(1)

Aside from the very retro print >> syntax, compare with this typical bash snippet

echo "Something went wrong. Exiting..." >&2
exit 1

This is the sort of thing I was talking about to in the earlier blog post, about writing code in the style of a language you’re more comfortable with.

To be clear, I don’t mention this to put my coworker down. The style is… unconventional, to be sure. But the script overall was functionally sound, with no bugs that I could see. So as far as I’m concerned, job’s a good’en.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, the pythonic way of doing the exit-on-error would be

sys.exit("Something went wrong. Exiting...")

When sys.exit is passed a string, it exits with code 1 and prints the message to stderr.

Chris

Python Written like Bash

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