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syntaxjupyter-notebook

What does an exclamation mark (!) before a statement do?

I was trying to install the dark theme in Jupyter notebook by typing this in notebook

pip install jupyterthemes
jt -t chesterish

The first command worked but I got some error in the 2nd one. Then I wrote this

!jt -t chesterish

And it worked. What did the exclamation mark do?

P.S. I am extremely new to python, just started last week

Solution

  • Any command prepended by exclamation point is run by your operating system shell instead of python. jt is actually a separate app called by your shell.