Calling an external command in Python

Question

How can I call an external command (as if I'd typed it at the Unix shell or Windows command prompt) from within a Python script?

Answer 1

os.system is OK, but kind of dated. It's also not very secure. Instead, try subprocess. subprocess does not call sh directly and is therefore more secure than os.system.

Get more information here.

Answer 2

https://docs.python.org/2/library/subprocess.html

...or for a very simple command:

import os
os.system('cat testfile')

Answer 3

import os
os.system("your command")

Note that this is dangerous, since the command isn't cleaned. I leave it up to you to google for the relevant documentation on the 'os' and 'sys' modules. There are a bunch of functions (exec* and spawn*) that will do similar things.

Answer 4

Check the "pexpect" Python library, too.

It allows for interactive controlling of external programs/commands, even ssh, ftp, telnet, etc. You can just type something like:

child = pexpect.spawn('ftp 192.168.0.24')

child.expect('(?i)name .*: ')

child.sendline('anonymous')

child.expect('(?i)password')

Answer 5

Calling an external command in Python

Simple, use subprocess.run, which returns a CompletedProcess object:

>>> import subprocess
>>> completed_process = subprocess.run('python --version')
Python 3.6.1 :: Anaconda 4.4.0 (64-bit)
>>> completed_process
CompletedProcess(args='python --version', returncode=0)

Why?

As of Python 3.5, the documentation recommends subprocess.run:

The recommended approach to invoking subprocesses is to use the run() function for all use cases it can handle. For more advanced use cases, the underlying Popen interface can be used directly.

Here's an example of the simplest possible usage - and it does exactly as asked:

>>> import subprocess
>>> completed_process = subprocess.run('python --version')
Python 3.6.1 :: Anaconda 4.4.0 (64-bit)
>>> completed_process
CompletedProcess(args='python --version', returncode=0)

run waits for the command to successfully finish, then returns a CompletedProcess object. It may instead raise TimeoutExpired (if you give it a timeout= argument) or CalledProcessError (if it fails and you pass check=True).

As you might infer from the above example, stdout and stderr both get piped to your own stdout and stderr by default.

We can inspect the returned object and see the command that was given and the returncode:

>>> completed_process.args
'python --version'
>>> completed_process.returncode
0

Capturing output

If you want to capture the output, you can pass subprocess.PIPE to the appropriate stderr or stdout:

>>> cp = subprocess.run('python --version', 
                        stderr=subprocess.PIPE, 
                        stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
>>> cp.stderr
b'Python 3.6.1 :: Anaconda 4.4.0 (64-bit)\r\n'
>>> cp.stdout
b''

(I find it interesting and slightly counterintuitive that the version info gets put to stderr instead of stdout.)

Pass a command list

One might easily move from manually providing a command string (like the question suggests) to providing a string built programmatically. Don't build strings programmatically. This is a potential security issue. It's better to assume you don't trust the input.

>>> import textwrap
>>> args = ['python', textwrap.__file__]
>>> cp = subprocess.run(args, stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
>>> cp.stdout
b'Hello there.\r\n  This is indented.\r\n'

Note, only args should be passed positionally.

Full Signature

Here's the actual signature in the source and as shown by help(run):

def run(*popenargs, input=None, timeout=None, check=False, **kwargs):

The popenargs and kwargs are given to the Popen constructor. input can be a string of bytes (or unicode, if specify encoding or universal_newlines=True) that will be piped to the subprocess's stdin.

The documentation describes timeout= and check=True better than I could:

The timeout argument is passed to Popen.communicate(). If the timeout expires, the child process will be killed and waited for. The TimeoutExpired exception will be re-raised after the child process has terminated.

If check is true, and the process exits with a non-zero exit code, a CalledProcessError exception will be raised. Attributes of that exception hold the arguments, the exit code, and stdout and stderr if they were captured.

and this example for check=True is better than one I could come up with:

>>> subprocess.run("exit 1", shell=True, check=True)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  ...
subprocess.CalledProcessError: Command 'exit 1' returned non-zero exit status 1

Expanded Signature

Here's an expanded signature, as given in the documentation:

subprocess.run(args, *, stdin=None, input=None, stdout=None, stderr=None, 
shell=False, cwd=None, timeout=None, check=False, encoding=None, 
errors=None)

Note that this indicates that only the args list should be passed positionally. So pass the remaining arguments as keyword arguments.

Popen

When use Popen instead? I would struggle to find use-case based on the arguments alone. Direct usage of Popen would, however, give you access to its methods, including poll, 'send_signal', 'terminate', and 'wait'.

Here's the Popen signature as given in the source. I think this is the most precise encapsulation of the information (as opposed to help(Popen)):

def __init__(self, args, bufsize=-1, executable=None,
             stdin=None, stdout=None, stderr=None,
             preexec_fn=None, close_fds=_PLATFORM_DEFAULT_CLOSE_FDS,
             shell=False, cwd=None, env=None, universal_newlines=False,
             startupinfo=None, creationflags=0,
             restore_signals=True, start_new_session=False,
             pass_fds=(), *, encoding=None, errors=None):

But more informative is the Popen documentation:

subprocess.Popen(args, bufsize=-1, executable=None, stdin=None,
                 stdout=None, stderr=None, preexec_fn=None, close_fds=True,
                 shell=False, cwd=None, env=None, universal_newlines=False,
                 startupinfo=None, creationflags=0, restore_signals=True,
                 start_new_session=False, pass_fds=(), *, encoding=None, errors=None)

Execute a child program in a new process. On POSIX, the class uses os.execvp()-like behavior to execute the child program. On Windows, the class uses the Windows CreateProcess() function. The arguments to Popen are as follows.

Understanding the remaining documentation on Popen will be left as an exercise for the reader.

Answer 6

With Standard Library

The Use subprocess module (Python 3):

import subprocess
subprocess.run(['ls', '-l'])

It is the recommended standard way. However, more complicated tasks (pipes, output, input, etc.) can be tedious to construct and write.

Note on Python version: If you are still using Python 2, subprocess.call works in a similar way.

ProTip: shlex.split can help you to parse the command for run, call, and other subprocess functions in case you don't want (or you can't!) provide them in form of lists:

import shlex
import subprocess
subprocess.run(shlex.split('ls -l'))

With External Dependencies

If you do not mind external dependencies, use plumbum:

from plumbum.cmd import ifconfig
print(ifconfig['wlan0']())

It is the best subprocess wrapper. It's cross-platform, i.e. it works on both Windows and Unix-like systems. Install by pip install plumbum.

Another popular library is sh:

from sh import ifconfig
print(ifconfig('wlan0'))

However, sh dropped Windows support, so it's not as awesome as it used to be. Install by pip install sh.