Question

I’ve been learning and clearing up some misunderstandings with pythons sys.argv. When I was passing different characters from the command-line in bash I noticed:

script.py

import sys
def test(x):
    return x

print test(sys.argv)

>>>python script.py [first, second, third]

Will print:

['script.py', '[first,', 'second,', 'third]']

and

>>>python script.py {first, second, third}

['script.py', '{first,','second,','third}']

But:

>>>python script.py (first,second,third)

bash: syntax error near unexpected token `('

Is this python or bash, maybe both? Any reason for it?

Answer 1

It’s bash; parens run a command chain in a subshell.

pwd ; ( cd /tmp ; pwd ) ; pwd

You will need to quote the parens if you want to use them in an argument.

echo '(foo)'