Using Python to parse complex arguments to shell script

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When I'm writing shell scripts, I often find myself spending most of my time (especially when debugging) dealing with argument processing. Many scripts I write or maintain are easily more than 80% input parsing and sanitization. I compare that to my Python scripts, where argparse handles most of the grunt work for me, and lets me easily construct complex option structures and sanitization / string parsing behavior.

I'd love, therefore, to be able to have Python do this heavy lifting, and then get these simplified and sanitized values in my shell script, without needing to worry any further about the arguments the user specified.

To give a specific example, many of the shell scripts where I work have been defined to accept their arguments in a specific order. You can call start_server.sh --server myserver --port 80 but start_server.sh --port 80 --server myserver fails with You must specify a server to start. - it makes the parsing code a lot simpler, but it's hardly intuitive.

So a first pass solution could be something as simple as having Python take in the arguments, sort them (keeping their parameters next to them) and returning the sorted arguments. So the shell script still does some parsing and sanitization, but the user can input much more arbitrary content than the shell script natively accepts, something like:

# script.sh -o -aR --dir /tmp/test --verbose

#!/bin/bash

args=$(order.py "$@")
# args is set to "-a --dir /tmp/test -o -R --verbose"

# simpler processing now that we can guarantee the order of parameters

There's some obvious limitations here, notably that parse.py can't distinguish between a final option with an argument and the start of indexed arguments, but that doesn't seem that terrible.

So here's my question: 1) Is there any existing (Python preferably) utility to enable CLI parsing by something more powerful than bash, which can then be accessed by the rest of my bash script after sanitization, or 2) Has anyone done this before? Are there issues or pitfalls or better solutions I'm not aware of? Care to share your implementation?

One (very half-baked) idea:

#!/bin/bash

# Some sort of simple syntax to describe to Python what arguments to accept
opts='
"a", "append", boolean, help="Append to existing file"
"dir", str, help="Directory to run from"
"o", "overwrite", boolean, help="Overwrite duplicates"
"R", "recurse", boolean, help="Recurse into subdirectories"
"v", "verbose", boolean, help="Print additional information"
'

# Takes in CLI arguments and outputs a sanitized structure (JSON?) or fails
p=$(parse.py "Runs complex_function with nice argument parsing" "$opts" "$@")
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; exit 1; fi # while parse outputs usage to stderr

# Takes the sanitized structure and an argument to get
append=$(arg.py "$p" append)
overwrite=$(arg.py "$p" overwrite)
recurse=$(arg.py "$p" recurse)
verbose=$(arg.py "$p" verbose)

cd $(python arg.py "$p" dir)

complex_function $append $overwrite $recurse $verbose

Two lines of code, along with concise descriptions of the arguments to expect, and we're on to the actual script behavior. Maybe I'm crazy, but that seems way nicer than what I feel like I have to do now.

I've seen Parsing shell script arguments and things like this wiki page on easy CLI argument parsing, but many of these patterns feel clunky and error prone, and I dislike having to re-implement them every time I write a shell script, especially when Python, Java, etc. have such nice argument processing libraries.

python command-line-arguments bash
4 Answers

The original premise of my question assumes that delegating to Python is the right approach to simplify argument parsing. If we drop the language requirement we can actually do a decent job* in Bash, using getopts and a little eval magic:

main() {
  local _usage='foo [-a] [-b] [-f val] [-v val] [args ...]'
  eval "$(parse_opts 'f:v:ab')"
  echo "f=$f v=$v a=$a b=$b -- $#: $*"
}

main "$@"

The implementation of parse_opts is in this gist, but the basic approach is to convert options into local variables which can then be handled like normal. All the standard getopts boilerplate is hidden away, and error handling works as expected.

Because it uses local variables within a function, parse_opts is not just useful for command line arguments, it can be used with any function in your script.

* I say "decent job" because Bash's getopts is a fairly limited parser and only supports single-letter options. Elegant, expressive CLIs are still better implemented in other languages like Python. But for reasonably small functions or scripts this provides a nice middle ground without adding too much complexity or bloat.

user_1136320
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