Scripting in Python | Py4

Before we used Python to make terminal programs however now we will make a program which controls our Linux system to do stuff; this is known as scripting.

Scripting is primarily used to automate tasks for websites and web applications while using an existing program. For this, we will use a module called subprocess this is used to run commands on your Linux system.

Subprocess init

First we will import subprocess by:

1

import subprocess

The basic syntax of this module to run commands is:

1

subprocess.run("{commands}", shell=true) 

For example, we can run the cd command to change our current working directory to a folder named Python.

1

subprocess.run("cd python/", shell=true)

This would run the command and change your current working directory to the folder named python/

breakdown

subprocess calls the module

.run runs the module so we can run our commands, this is taken from its documentation

shell= this is a boolean value that indicates if we want to run the string given in ( ). This allows us to actually run the command rather than just put the string their on the terminal.

Application

This can be useful for doing a lot of things like extracting stored WiFi passwords, house keeping, converting media, et cetera. Here are some of the scripts I have created in the past:

• WiFi pwd extractor: https://github.com/mansoorbarri/PythonScripts/blob/main/LinuxWifi.py
• Files’ house keeping: https://github.com/mansoorbarri/PythonScripts/blob/main/copy-files.py
• Converting media:
  • images: https://github.com/mansoorbarri/PythonScripts/blob/main/png-to-webp.py
  • HTML-MD: https://github.com/mansoorbarri/PythonScripts/blob/main/html-md-editor

You can find guides for all of the scripts here: /python

that’s all <3