Sometimes I'm doing stuff in PDB, the Python debugger, and I would like to hop out to a Bash prompt. Maybe I want to see what is the current directory, or what files are in the current directory, or I'd like to run some executable in this environment, or see what is on the current path. Anyway the trick is to do this.
$ python -m pdb foo.py
> /Users/wware/foo.py(3)<module>()
-> import os
(Pdb) n
> /Users/wware/foo.py(4)<module>()
-> import time
(Pdb) os.system("/bin/bash -")
bash-3.2$ pwd
/Users/wware
bash-3.2$ ls *.py
foo.py hack.py bar.py baz.p views.py
bash-3.2$ exit
exit
0
(Pdb) n
> /Users/wware/foo.py(5)<module>()
-> some more python....
(Pdb) q
As a one-liner you have
> import os; os.system("/bin/bash -")
You might want to use os.environ['SHELL'] instead of /bin/bash in case the shell is elsewhere,
or in case for some bizarre reason you want some shell other than Bash.
This can also be an alias in a .pdbrc file. This will allow you to use "sh" as a PDB command that
puts you into a Bash session.
alias sh import os; os.system(os.environ['SHELL'] + ' -')