Running Python from a Bash Script

Sometimes, it isn't best to do everything via Python. In my case, due to multi-factor authentication, I couldn't send emails via Python and instead was able to use bash to run the python code and send an email if it failed.

Video version:

You can get the full code in the Gitlab repo here:

Bash

#!/bin/bash
python3 $1 $2

python_status=$?

current_date=`date "+%D %T"`

msg="A script has ran to error:  

Server: $HOSTNAME

Script Name: $1 

Time: $current_date"

echo "$python_status"
echo "$msg"

#msg="The following Script ran to error: $1 at $current_date"
#if [ $python_status -ne 0 ]; then
##    echo "$msg" | mailx -s "Script Failure"  vash@email;
#fi;

To execute this code, you will need to make it executable. You can right click on the run_script.sh file and click properties.

In the permissions tab, make sure to check the 'Is executable' box.

Alternately, cd to the directory this is in and run chmod +x run_script.sh . You should not need elevated privilages if this script is in your home directory.

Python

import sys

print ('Number of arguments:', len(sys.argv), 'arguments.')
print ('Argument sent:', str(sys.argv[1]))

This section of the bash script is all about assigning some variables:

python3 $1 $2

python_status=$?

current_date=`date "+%D %T"`

The important thing here is python3 $1 $2 what that does is runs the command python3 then loads in 2 command line arguments.

In our case, we are inserting the name of the python script test.py and hi as a second argument.

The $? is special, it will receieve the status of our script. So in this case a 0 or 1. 0 means the script ran to success, 1 means it did not.

The full call for this run will be ./run_script.sh test.py hi

hi will be passed to the python script. It will be shown in the output due to line 3 print ('Argument sent:', str(sys.argv[1]))

Since the bash script only takes 2 arguments (the first is the name of the python script) we cannot get any other command line arugments.

Here's an example of the code running as expected: