How to execute svn command along with grep on windows? - python-3.x

Question

Trying to execute svn command on windows machine and capture the output for the same.
Code:
import subprocess
cmd = "svn log -l1 https://repo/path/trunk | grep ^r | awk '{print \$3}'"
p = subprocess.Popen(cmd, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, shell=True)
'grep' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.
I do understand that 'grep' is not windows utility.
Getting error as "grep' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file."
Is it only limited to execute on Linux?
Can we execute the same on Windows?
Is my code right?

Answer 1

For windows your command will look something like the following
svn log -l1 https://repo/path/trunk | find "string_to_find"
You need to use the find utility in windows to get the same effect as grep.
svn --version | find "ra"
* ra_svn : Module for accessing a repository using the svn network protocol.
* ra_local : Module for accessing a repository on local disk.
* ra_serf : Module for accessing a repository via WebDAV protocol using serf.

Answer 2

Use svn log --search FOO instead of grep-ing the command's output.

Answer 3

grep and awk are certainly available for Windows as well, but there is really no need to install them -- the code is easy to replace with native Python.
import subprocess
p = subprocess.run(["svn", "log", "-l1", "https://repo/path/trunk"],
capture_output=True, text=True)
for line in p.stdout.splitlines():
# grep ^r
if line.startswith('r'):
# awk '{ print $3 }'
print(line.split()[2])
Because we don't need a pipeline, and just run a single static command, we can avoid shell=True.
Because we don't want to do the necessary plumbing (which you forgot anyway) for Popen(), we prefer subprocess.run(). With capture_output=True we conveniently get its output in the resulting object's stdout atrribute; because we expect text output, we pass text=True (in older Python versions you might need to switch to the old, slightly misleading synonym universal_newlines=True).
I guess the intent is to search for the committer in each revision's output, but this will incorrectly grab the third token on any line which starts with an r (so if you have a commit message like "refactored to use Python native code" the code will extract use from that). A better approach altogether is to request machine-readable output from svn and parse that (but it's unfortunately rather clunky XML, so there's another not entirely trivial rabbithole for you). Perhaps as middle ground implement a more specific pattern for finding those lines -- maybe look for a specific number of fields, and static strings where you know where to expect them.
if line.startswith('r'):
fields = line.split()
if len(fields) == 13 and fields[1] == '|' and fields[3] == '|':
print(fields[2])
You could also craft a regular expression to look for a date stamp in the third |-separated field, and the number of changed lines in the fourth.
For the record, a complete commit message from Subversion looks like
------------------------------------------------------------------------
r16110 | tripleee | 2020-10-09 10:41:13 +0300 (Fri, 09 Oct 2020) | 4 lines
refactored to use native Python instead of grep + awk
(which is a useless use of grep anyway; see http://www.iki.fi/era/unix/award.html#grep)