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I hope this article encourages you to think about your command line programs in a different light, and to treat them as first class objects. Using inheritance to share code is so common in other areas of development that it is hardly given a second thought in most cases. As has been shown with the SQLiteAppBase programs, the same technique can be just as powerful when applied to building command line programs, saving development time and testing effort as a result. CommandLineApp has been used as the foundation for dozens of types of programs, and could be just what you need the next time you have to write a new command line program.

Osh (Object SHell) is a tool that integrates the processing of structured data, database access, and remote access to a cluster of nodes. These capabilities are made available through a command-line interface (CLI) and a Python application programming interface (API). Osh processes streams of Python objects using simple commands. Complex data processing is achieved by command sequences in which the output from one command is passed to the input of the next. This is similar to composing Unix commands using pipes. However, Unix commands pass strings from one command to the next, and the commands (grep, awk, sed, etc.) are heavily string-oriented. Osh commands send primitive Python types such as strings and numbers; composite types such as tuples, lists and maps; objects representing files, dates and times; or even user-defined objects.

The pycurl package is a Python interface to libcurl (http://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/). pycurl has been successfully built and tested with Python versions from 2.2 to the current 2.5.x releases.