Robin's Blog

A couple of handy zsh/bash functions for Python programmers

Just a quick post today, to tell you about a couple of simple zsh functions that I find handy as a Python programmer.

First, pyimp – a very simple function that tries to import a module in Python and displays the output. If there is no output then the import succeeded, otherwise you’ll see the error. This saves constantly going into a Python interpreter and trying to import something, making that ‘has it worked or not’ cycle a bit quicker when installing a tricky package.

The function is defined as

function pyimp() { python -c "import $1" }

This just calls Python with the -c flag which tells it to execute the code you’ve given on the command line – which in this case is just an import command.

You can see below that it returns nothing for a module which is importable, but returns the error for anything which fails:

$ pyimp numpy
$ pyimp blah
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'blah'

The second is pycd which changes directory to the folder where a particular module is defined. This can be useful if you want to inspect the code of the module in depth, or if you’ve installed the module in ‘develop mode’ and want to actually edit the code.

It’s defined as:

function pycd () {
    pushd python -c "import os.path, $1; print(os.path.dirname($1.__file__))";
}

It just changes to the directory that modulename.file is located in – again, fairly simple but quite useful.

As you’ve read to here, I’ll drop in a bonus function to display the column names of a CSV file:

function csvcols() { head -n 1 $1 | tr , \\n }

This combines the unix head tool to get the line of a file and the tr tool to convert commas to newlines, to make a handy little command.

If you found this post useful, please consider buying me a coffee.
This post originally appeared on Robin's Blog.

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Categorised as: Computing, Linux, OSX, Programming, Python