Making Python Act Like Bash

Python is a very powerful language, with just a couple of lines you can make Python behave like a mini bash shell.
It sounded too good so I tried writing those couple of lines and result was a tiny program that lets you run commands like ls, pwd or anything else you'd normally run in terminal, all from inside Python.

Full code:

import os

command = input("$ ")

while command != "exit":
    os.system(command)
    command = input("$ ")

print("Thank you, exiting!")

How it works?

• Python shows me a prompt ($ ) and waits for my input.
• If I type something like ls (on Linux/Mac) or dir (on Windows), it passes that command to os.system().
• Behind the scenes, os.system() calls a C function (system()), which then asks the shell (/bin/sh or cmd.exe) to run the command.
• The shell runs it, prints the output right in my terminal, and then Python asks me again for the next command.
• If I type exit, the loop stops and the script politely says “Thank you, exiting!”

Here's the flow diagram:

So that was it, remember...running raw shell commands is a risky job as someone could just rm -rf * deleting everything on your computer but it’s a nice way to peek under the hood at how Python talks to the operating system.