IPython Notebook: %run magic on non-python file types

Question

From in the notebook, it's easy to run an external python module with %run. For example, if I wanted to run foo.py:

 %run foo

But how does one run a file not ending in .py? For example, if I had a bash script, bar. When I try:

 %run bar
 ERROR: File `u'$bar.py'` not found.

A while back, someone showed me how to pass the filename so that %run doesn't append the .py suffix, but I can't dig it up!

Thanks

Some Context for why I want to do it this way

Thanks for the comments. To address why I'd like to do something like this, we are distributing an assignment in the IPython notebook for students in an intro programming class, and want them to use nbconvert to submit it as an HTML file. Many of them use windows, and are using Canopy as their Python distribution. To "open a terminal, cd to the working directory and running nbconvert" would be difficult, especially if nbconvert is not in their environmental variables. It would be much easier on us to just have a one-liner that they can run from within the notebook environment.

• Joran Beasley: why would you want to do this? ... I dont have an answer to your question, but I have a hard time imagining a scenario where this is the right thing to do ...
• runDOSrun: possible duplicate of execute Bash command from IPython
• Adam Hughes: Joran, I edited my answer to explain why we think it's a good approach.

Answer 1

Creator of ipython suggests this:

%%bash 
. ~/.bashrc

Answer 2

Yes, the %%bash magic worked fine. Sorry I didn't catch this.

%%bash 
ipython nbconvert --to html worldmap_notebook.ipynb