shellio

ShellIO is a Python interface for interacting with Unix-like shells (sh, bash, zsh) using pseudoterminals (PTY). It enables real-time communication with interactive shell processes, capturing and parsing output including ANSI escape sequences.

Features

• ✅ Spawn interactive shell sessions (sh, bash, zsh)
• 📤 Send input directly to the shell (stdin)
• 📥 Read output instantly using PTY — no line buffering delay
• 🧩 Detect and split ANSI escape sequences from raw output
• 🧼 Automatically terminates all shell processes on exit
• 🧵 Background threading for non-blocking output reading
• 🔀 Supports multiple concurrent shell instances

Use Cases

• Terminal emulators
• Shell automation tools
• Output parsers
• Teaching/debugging shell interactions

Instalation

$ pip install shellio

Example of usage:

from shellio import ShellIO

# Initialize a new shell object
shell = ShellIO('bash', []) # zsh, sh or bash

# You can specify a path where to start the shell
shell.set_cwd('.')

# Start the process
shell.run()

# Clear last output file
open('output.txt', 'w').close()

# Put the first command with a return
shell.put('ls -la\n')

# Wait a second for output
shell.wait(2)

# Put the second command
shell.put('touch works.txt\n')

# Read all bytes from shell and save it to a file
for b in shell.get(timeout=0.01):
    print(b.decode(), end='')
    with open('output.txt', 'a') as file:
        file.write(b.decode())