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Command Line Automation in Python

Learn to automate many common file system tasks and be able to manage and communicate with processes.

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4 Hours16 Videos51 Exercises6,539 Learners

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Course Description

There are certain skills that will stay with you your entire life. One of those skills is learning to automate things. There is a motto for automation that gets straight to the point, "If it isn't automated...it's broken". In this course, you learn to adopt this mindset. In one of the many examples, you will create automation code that will traverse a filesystem, find files that match a pattern, and then detect which files are duplicates. Following the course, you will be able to automate many common file system tasks and be able to manage and communicate with Unix processes.
  1. 1

    IPython shell commands

    Free

    Learn to use powerful IPython shell commands that will enhance your day to day coding. These commands include SList objects that can sort and filter shell output all from the comfort of the IPython terminal.

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    Learn the Python interpreter
    50 xp
    Execute Python commands
    100 xp
    Execute IPython shell commands
    100 xp
    Capture IPython Shell output
    50 xp
    Using Bash Magic command
    100 xp
    Using the ! operator in IPython
    100 xp
    Automate with SList
    50 xp
    Use SList fields to parse shell output
    100 xp
    Find Python files using SLIST grep
    100 xp
    Using SList to grep
    100 xp
  2. 2

    Shell commands with subprocess

    Learn to harness Unix processes with the subprocess module. By combining the output and input of scripts, processes, and applications, you'll create pipelines to automate complex tasks.

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    Execute shell commands in subprocess
    50 xp
    Permission check
    100 xp
    Reading a creepy AI poem
    100 xp
    Running processes script
    100 xp
    Capture output of shell commands
    50 xp
    Using subprocess Popen
    100 xp
    Waiting for processes
    100 xp
    Detecting duplicate files with subprocess
    100 xp
    Sending input to processes
    50 xp
    Counting files in a directory tree
    100 xp
    Running a health check
    100 xp
    Passing arguments safely to shell commands
    50 xp
    Safely find directories
    100 xp
    Directory summarizer
    100 xp
  3. 3

    Walking the file system

    Use the pathlib module to perform file system operations in Python. You'll learn to write tools to walk the filesystem, write files and archive directories all with a few lines of code.

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    Dealing with file systems
    50 xp
    Double trouble
    100 xp
    Y'all got some renaming to do
    100 xp
    Sweet pickle
    100 xp
    Find files matching a pattern
    50 xp
    Rogue founder code
    100 xp
    Is this pattern True?
    100 xp
    High-level file and directory operations
    50 xp
    Goons over my shammy
    100 xp
    Archive users
    100 xp
    Using pathlib
    50 xp
    Does it even exist?
    100 xp
    File writing one-liner
    100 xp
  4. 4

    Command line functions

    Learn how to use functions to automate complex workflows. You'll use the click command line tool module to create sophisticated command line tools in a few lines of code.

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    Using functions for automation
    50 xp
    Funky clusters
    100 xp
    Hello decorator
    100 xp
    Debugging decorator
    100 xp
    Understand script input
    50 xp
    Using python command-line tools
    50 xp
    Backwards day
    100 xp
    Introduction to Click
    50 xp
    Simple yet true
    100 xp
    Running a click application from subprocess
    100 xp
    Using click to write command line tools
    50 xp
    Got a ticket to write
    100 xp
    Invoking command line tests
    100 xp
    Course Summary
    50 xp

Collaborators

Hillary Green-Lerman
Adrián Soto

Prerequisites

Intermediate PythonIntroduction to Shell
Noah Gift HeadshotNoah Gift

Lecturer and consultant in data science

Noah Gift is a lecturer and consultant at UC Davis Graduate School of Management, Duke MIDS, UC Berkeley and Northwestern. He teaches and designs graduate machine learning, AI, Data Science courses and consults on Machine Learning and Cloud Architecture. He has published over 100 technical publications including multiple books on subjects ranging from Cloud Machine Learning to DevOps. Gift received an MBA from UC Davis, a M.S. in Computer Information Systems from Cal State Los Angeles, and a B.S. in Nutritional Science from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. He is the author of Python for DevOps, Pragmatic AI, Cloud Computing for Data Analysis, and Testing in Python.
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