Shell (bash)

Giving agents access to the shell is powerful (though risky outside a sandboxed environment).

The LLM can use it to execute any shell commands. A common use case for this is letting the LLM interact with your local file system.

Note: Shell tool does not work with Windows OS.

%pip install --upgrade --quiet langchain-community

from langchain_community.tools import ShellTool

shell_tool = ShellTool()

API Reference:ShellTool

print(shell_tool.run({"commands": ["echo 'Hello World!'", "time"]}))

Hello World!

real	0m0.000s
user	0m0.000s
sys	0m0.000s
``````output
/Users/wfh/code/lc/lckg/langchain/tools/shell/tool.py:34: UserWarning: The shell tool has no safeguards by default. Use at your own risk.
  warnings.warn(

Use with Agents

As with all tools, these can be given to an agent to accomplish more complex tasks. Let's have the agent fetch some links from a web page.

from langgraph.prebuilt import create_react_agent

tools = [shell_tool]
agent = create_react_agent("openai:gpt-4.1-mini", tools)

input_message = {
    "role": "user",
    "content": (
        "Download the README here and identify the link for LangChain tutorials: "
        "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/langchain-ai/langchain/master/README.md"
    ),
}

for step in agent.stream(
    {"messages": [input_message]},
    stream_mode="values",
):
    step["messages"][-1].pretty_print()

API Reference:create_react_agent

================================ Human Message =================================

Download the README here and identify the link for LangChain tutorials: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/langchain-ai/langchain/master/README.md
================================== Ai Message ==================================
Tool Calls:
  terminal (call_mr86V0d6E9nQiJZT7Xw5fH0G)
 Call ID: call_mr86V0d6E9nQiJZT7Xw5fH0G
  Args:
    commands: ['curl -o README.md https://raw.githubusercontent.com/langchain-ai/langchain/master/README.md']
Executing command:
 ['curl -o README.md https://raw.githubusercontent.com/langchain-ai/langchain/master/README.md']
================================= Tool Message =================================
Name: terminal

  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100  5169  100  5169    0     0   114k      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--  114k
``````output
/langchain/libs/community/langchain_community/tools/shell/tool.py:33: UserWarning: The shell tool has no safeguards by default. Use at your own risk.
  warnings.warn(
``````output
================================== Ai Message ==================================
Tool Calls:
  terminal (call_LF8TGrgS84WvUvaazYnVfib8)
 Call ID: call_LF8TGrgS84WvUvaazYnVfib8
  Args:
    commands: ["grep -i 'tutorial' README.md"]
Executing command:
 ["grep -i 'tutorial' README.md"]
================================= Tool Message =================================
Name: terminal

- [Tutorials](https://python.langchain.com/docs/tutorials/): Simple walkthroughs with
``````output
/langchain/libs/community/langchain_community/tools/shell/tool.py:33: UserWarning: The shell tool has no safeguards by default. Use at your own risk.
  warnings.warn(
``````output
================================== Ai Message ==================================

The link for LangChain tutorials in the README is: https://python.langchain.com/docs/tutorials/

Related

• Tool conceptual guide
• Tool how-to guides