Piping external commands

[Simon Forman]

saibotorama at gmail.com wrote:
> What is the Python translation for this Bash statement:
>
>   tar cf - "${files[@]}" | bzip2 > "$file".tar.bz2
>
> (Ignoring the fact that "tar cjf" also exists...)
>
> In other words, how does one pipe together arbitrary commands?

For piping subcommands check out the subprocess module, especially
http://docs.python.org/lib/node242.html , for bzip2 check out the bz2
module http://docs.python.org/lib/module-bz2.html , but note, there's
also a tarfile module http://docs.python.org/lib/module-tarfile.html
which can handle bzip2 as well.

HTH,
~Simon