Run a shell command with a pipe operator

I’ve just been able to solve my own problem.
If I do: os.cmd(:"sleep 0.1 | echo foo") it works.

So I need to pass an atom to os.cmd.

Or :os.cmd('sleep 0.1 | echo foo').

iex(1)> :os.cmd('sleep 0.1 | echo foo')
'foo\n'

It works with atoms and character lists. Doesn’t seem to work with binaries.

I would try to avoid creating new atoms for each command you might want to run since they are not garbage collected.

System.cmd does not run a shell, so pipes, redirects, and so on aren’t supported. System.cmd is basically the closest thing that Elixir has to fork.

:os.cmd is definitely handy, but take great care if any of the stuff in your command comes from users (like filenames). You risk letting users run arbitrary programs.

It is strange that :os.cmd accepts an atom for the command name, looks like a historical accident.

In general, functions from the Erlang standard library take character lists where in Elixir you would use a string. To make it more confusing, the Erlang type for such lists is called string(). I recommend taking a look at this cheat sheet if you still feel confused.

Going back to your problem, Ben has already done a good job explaining the difference between Elixir’s System.cmd and Erlang’s :os.cmd. In the source code for :os.cmd you can see it actually spawns a shell appropriate for the current OS and evaluates the string you’ve passed to the function in that shell.

Replicating this behaviour for your particular example using System.cmd is easy:

System.cmd("sh", ["sleep 0.1 | echo foo"])

Not entirely. A lot of the ‘base’ functions get the string value of atoms, it makes it cheap and efficient to pass around something like sed instead of having to do "sed" in the original erlang (plus it’s fantastic since atoms in erlang can have @ in them without quoting too!). Calling other programs was generally used to access their stdin/stdout, not for argument parsing and ‘doing’ other stuff.

(Do note, the sed and "sed" above in erlang, in elixir would be :sed and 'sed' respectively.)

Why is this an advantage for calling functions that happen to also accept atoms and not only charlists?

Overall less space for repeatedly used ‘strings’, atoms are essentially interned/flyweight’d strings after all (and lists of integers are anything but lightweight in memory, even if they are very fast iterables). Not really an issue nowadays, but Erlang is old remember. ^.^

As for the @ bit, it’s because they are used in areas on the VM such as server names, cookies, etc… Like in elixir you’d have to do :"username@server" where in erlang you’d just do username@server, nothing else needed, which is a great boon when manually doing a lot of work at the console or putting those in erlang config files. But of course, the ecosystem handles that better now and so things like Elixir don’t even support @ in unquoted atoms unlike Erlang. ^.^;

System.cmd("sh", ["sleep 0.1"]) results in /usr/bin/sh: sleep 0.1: No such file or directory {"", 127}. So this solution doesn’t seem to work

I made a mistake in the invocation. To evaluate a string in sh, the -c has to be passed first:

System.cmd("sh", ["-c", "sleep 0.1"])