Avoid escaping glob expressions in plumbum

Question

Suppose I want to run something like ls a* using plumbum.

from plumbum.cmd import ls
ls['a*']()
...
ProcessExecutionError: Command line: ['/bin/ls', 'a*']
Exit code: 1
Stderr:  | ls: a*: No such file or directory

I understand plumbum automatically escapes the arguments, which is usually a good thing. But is there a way to make it understand glob expressions should be passed to the shell as-is?

Answer 1

But is there a way to make it understand glob expressions should be passed to the shell as-is?

plumbum passes a* to ls command as-is. ls command doesn't run any shell, so there is no glob expansion (it is done by the shell on *nix).

You could use glob module to do the expansion:

from glob import glob

ls('-l', *glob('a*'))

Another way is to use Workdir object:

from plumbum import local

ls('-l', *local.cwd // 'a*')

To defer the call; you could use ls['-l'][args] syntax (note: there is probably a bug in plumbum 1.1.0 version that requires to convert args list to a tuple explicitly).

If you want; you could call the shell:

from plumbum.cmd import sh

sh('-c', 'ls -l a*')

Note: Python's glob.glob() function might produce the glob expansion different from that of the shell.

Answer 2

You can do your own glob expansion using Python's builtin glob module. For your example:

from plumbum.cmd import ls
from glob import glob

ls[glob('a*')]

Answer 3

For the special case of ls, there's another way:

from plumbum import local

p = local.path('path/to/dir')
local.cwd.glob(str(p) + 'a*')

-- or --

from plumbum import local

p = local.path('path/to/dir')
local.cwd.chdir(p)
local.cwd.glob('a*')