That looks like a snippet from a command session which is a perfectly great place to be using sh syntax.

If it became unwieldy you’d turn it into a script:

  #!/bin/sh

  beautify() {
    sed -e ‘
      s/ugly/beautiful/g
      …other stuff
    ‘
  }

  select() {
    awk ‘
      {print $2, $4}
      …other stuff
    ‘
  }

  mycommand | beautify | select

For me, now it’s starting to look like it could be safer to do these things in a real language.

Is it really so bad? A bit more verbose but also more readable, can be plenty short and sweet for me. I probably wouldn't even choose Python here myself and it's the kind of thing shell scripting is tailor-made for, but I'd at least be more comfortable maintaining or extending this version over that:

  from subprocess import Popen, PIPE

  CMD = ("printf", "x:hello:67:ugly!\nyy$:bye:5:ugly.\n")
  OUT = "something.report"
  ERR = "err.log"

  def beautify(str_bytes):
      return str_bytes.decode().replace("ugly", "beautiful")

  def filter(str, \*index):
      parts = str.split(":")
      return " ".join([parts[i-1] for i in index])

  with open(OUT, "w") as out, open(ERR, "w") as err:
      proc = Popen(CMD, stdout=PIPE, stderr=err)
      for line_bytes in proc.stdout:
        out.write(filter(beautify(line_bytes), 2, 4))

I would agree though if this is a one-off need where you have a specific dataset to chop up and aren't concerned with recreating or tweaking the process bash can likely get it done faster.

Edit: this is proving very difficult to format on mobile, sorry if it's not perfect.

In ruby you can just call out to the shell with backticks.

Like.

    myvar = `mycommand | sed 's/ugly/beautiful/g' | awk -F: '{print $2,$4}' 1> something.report 2> err.log`

That way, if something is easier in Ruby you do it in ruby, if something is easier in shell, you can just pull its output into a variable.. I avoid 99% of shell scripting this way.

I don’t think it’s fair to compare a workflow that is designed for sed/awk. It’s about 10 lines of python to run my command and capture stdout/stderr - the benefit of which is that I can actually read it. What happens if you want to retry a line if it fails?

Just ask chatgpt and you’ll get a script, probably makes some tests too if you ask for it.

import os

os.system('mycommand | sed 's/ugly/beautiful/g' | awk -F: '{print $2,$4}' 1> something.report 2> err.log')