Execute file in ipython interpreter

Question

I'm trying to run a file inside the ipython interpreter. The documentation makes this sound as simple as ipython file.py in the shell or %run file.py inside the interpreter itself. However, I want to read a file that contains commands to the ipython "system shell". Here's an example:

files= !ls
print files

for this type of commands, invoking the interpreter as mentioned above results in SyntaxError, as if it was executed by /usr/bin/python.

Is it possible to run a file from the system shell as if it were executing inside the ipython shell interpreter?

Answer 1

It looks like you can do this if you name your file with an .ipy extension.

sam@blackbird-debian:~
$ cat tmp.ipy
me = !whoami
print me
sam@blackbird-debian:~
$ ipython tmp.ipy
['sam']

Answer 2

I assume you want to do this from an already running IPython session. There is probably something much simpler, but all I could think of right now is:

get_ipython().shell.run_cell(open('path/to/commands').read())

Another crazy idea - start IPython as EDITOR=cat ipython. Now you can load commands from a file with:

%edit -r path/to/commands

There should probably be a real magic for your use case, though.

---

Or you could do the same thing non-interactively (add -i to drop into interactive mode):

ipython -c 'get_ipython().shell.run_cell(open("path/to/commands").read())'