Idiomatic way of handling binary data from commands? about sh

[ecederstrand]

I think using BytesIO is perfectly idiomatic, short and readable:

from io import BytesIO
from sh import cat

out = BytesIO()
# tmp.out created as: dd if=/dev/random of=tmp.out count=100
cat("tmp.out", _out=out)
out.seek(0)
out.read()
# b'\xa2\x99\x1f4\xb8l\xdf\xbb[...]'

I don't think adding a _stdout_bytes to handle this is necessary.

[amoffat]

Can you pipe _out to a BytesIO buffer?

[chaserhkj]

Yes, that is one way to do it, but still feel a little bit of extra since that would require importing another module as well. I'm just suggesting maybe the addition of a flag to handle this, but this is ultimately up to your preference and taste. I would probably be happy with BytesIO