Python as a scripting language. Alternative to bash script?

[Jorgen Grahn]

On Mon, 2010-06-28, John Nagle wrote:
> On 6/28/2010 7:58 AM, Benjamin Kaplan wrote:
>> How does a program return anything other than an exit code?
>
>     Ah, yes, the second biggest design mistake in UNIX.
>
>     Programs have "argv" and "argc", plus environment variables,
> going in.  So, going in, there are essentially subroutine parameters.
> But all that comes back is an exit code. They should have had
> something similar coming back, with arguments to "exit()" returning
> the results.  Then the "many small intercommunicating programs"
> concept would have worked much better.

Like others said, you have standard output. sys.stdout for data,
sys.stderr for human-readable errors and warnings, and the exit code
for machine-readable errors.

>     C was like that once.  In the 1970s, all you could return was
> an "int" or a "float".  But that got fixed.

Huh? The C we have today cannot return a float, and not even a full int.
0 and 1 work, small integers up to 255 are likely to work, but beyond
that common systems (Unix) will chop off the high bits.

/Jorgen

-- 
  // Jorgen Grahn <grahn@  Oo  o.   .  .
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