> I think it is good to have a function which can be used easily when distributing this kind of package.

I don't think that we should put this stuff into distutils, it's too specific for UNIX, and your patch only supports a few shells.

It's better to put that into a project which is updated more frequently on PyPI.

Stdlib is more for "frozen" stuff, we only update the stdlib every ~18 months! (each Python major release)