IPython.core.magics.osm:OSMagics.sc

Extended Summary

DEPRECATED. Suboptimal, retained for backwards compatibility.

You should use the form 'var = !command' instead. Example:

"%sc -l myfiles = ls ~" should now be written as

"myfiles = !ls ~"

myfiles.s, myfiles.l and myfiles.n still apply as documented below.

-- %sc [options] varname=command

IPython will run the given command using commands.getoutput(), and will then update the user's interactive namespace with a variable called varname, containing the value of the call. Your command can contain shell wildcards, pipes, etc.

The '=' sign in the syntax is mandatory, and the variable name you supply must follow Python's standard conventions for valid names.

(A special format without variable name exists for internal use)

Options:

-l: list output. Split the output on newlines into a list before assigning it to the given variable. By default the output is stored as a single string.

-v: verbose. Print the contents of the variable.

In most cases you should not need to split as a list, because the returned value is a special type of string which can automatically provide its contents either as a list (split on newlines) or as a space-separated string. These are convenient, respectively, either for sequential processing or to be passed to a shell command.

For example

# Capture into variable a
In [1]: sc a=ls *py

# a is a string with embedded newlines
In [2]: a
Out[2]: 'setup.py\nwin32_manual_post_install.py'

# which can be seen as a list:
In [3]: a.l
Out[3]: ['setup.py', 'win32_manual_post_install.py']

# or as a whitespace-separated string:
In [4]: a.s
Out[4]: 'setup.py win32_manual_post_install.py'

# a.s is useful to pass as a single command line:
In [5]: !wc -l $a.s
  146 setup.py
  130 win32_manual_post_install.py
  276 total

# while the list form is useful to loop over:
In [6]: for f in a.l:
   ...:      !wc -l $f
   ...:
146 setup.py
130 win32_manual_post_install.py

Similarly, the lists returned by the -l option are also special, in the sense that you can equally invoke the .s attribute on them to automatically get a whitespace-separated string from their contents

In [7]: sc -l b=ls *py

In [8]: b
Out[8]: ['setup.py', 'win32_manual_post_install.py']

In [9]: b.s
Out[9]: 'setup.py win32_manual_post_install.py'

In summary, both the lists and strings used for output capture have the following special attributes

.l (or .list) : value as list.
.n (or .nlstr): value as newline-separated string.
.s (or .spstr): value as space-separated string.