Using a conditional in the python interpreter -c command

Question

I am trying to figure out how to pass the following conditional statement into the python interpreter's command option (-c).

if sys.maxsize > 2**32:
    print '64'
else:
    print '32'

64

However, I continually get syntax errors, such as the following:

>python -c "import sys; if sys.maxsize > 2**32: print '64' else: print '32';"
  File "<string>", line 1
    import sys; if sys.maxsize > 2**32: print '64' else: print '32';
                 ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

I found it surprisingly difficult to find a good example of this usage. I must be missing something big here...

Answer 1

After a (very) brief search, I can't find this documented anywhere, but it seems that -c strictly takes an expression (ie, something that can appear on the RHS of an assignment), not a statement. To get around this in your case, you need to do two things:

1. Use the print function (function calls are an expression) rather than the print statement
2. Use Python's a if b else c conditional expression

This gives you:

lvc@tiamat:~$ python -c "from __future__ import print_function; import sys; print('64' if sys.maxsize > 2**32 else '32')"
64