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

Without the output of the result:

import os
os.system("your command here")

With output of the result:

import commands
commands.getoutput("your command here")
or
commands.getstatusoutput("your command here")

Answer 2

Some hints on detaching the child process from the calling one (starting the child process in background).

Suppose you want to start a long task from a CGI-script, that is the child process should live longer than the CGI-script execution process.

The classical example from the subprocess module docs is:

import subprocess
import sys

# some code here

pid = subprocess.Popen([sys.executable, "longtask.py"]) # call subprocess

# some more code here

The idea here is that you do not want to wait in the line 'call subprocess' until the longtask.py is finished. But it is not clear what happens after the line 'some more code here' from the example.

My target platform was freebsd, but the development was on windows, so I faced the problem on windows first.

On windows (win xp), the parent process will not finish until the longtask.py has finished its work. It is not what you want in CGI-script. The problem is not specific to Python, in PHP community the problems are the same.

The solution is to pass DETACHED_PROCESS Process Creation Flag to the underlying CreateProcess function in win API. If you happen to have installed pywin32 you can import the flag from the win32process module, otherwise you should define it yourself:

DETACHED_PROCESS = 0x00000008

pid = subprocess.Popen([sys.executable, "longtask.py"],
                       creationflags=DETACHED_PROCESS).pid

/* UPD 2015.10.27 @eryksun in a comment below notes, that the semantically correct flag is CREATE_NEW_CONSOLE (0x00000010) */

On freebsd we have another problem: when the parent process is finished, it finishes the child processes as well. And that is not what you want in CGI-script either. Some experiments showed that the problem seemed to be in sharing sys.stdout. And the working solution was the following:

pid = subprocess.Popen([sys.executable, "longtask.py"], stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE, stdin=subprocess.PIPE)

I have not checked the code on other platforms and do not know the reasons of the behaviour on freebsd. If anyone knows, please share your ideas. Googling on starting background processes in Python does not shed any light yet.

Answer 3

You can use Popen, and then you can check the procedure's status:

from subprocess import Popen

proc = Popen(['ls', '-l'])
if proc.poll() is None:
    proc.kill()

Check out subprocess.Popen.

Answer 4

There is another difference here which is not mentioned previously.

subprocess.Popen executes the <command> as a subprocess. In my case, I need to execute file <a> which needs to communicate with another program, <b>.

I tried subprocess, and execution was successful. However <b> could not communicate with <a>. Everything is normal when I run both from the terminal.

One more: (NOTE: kwrite behaves different from other applications. If you try the below with Firefox, the results will not be the same.)

If you try os.system("kwrite"), program flow freezes until the user closes kwrite. To overcome that I tried instead os.system(konsole -e kwrite). This time program continued to flow, but kwrite became the subprocess of the console.

Anyone runs the kwrite not being a subprocess (i.e. in the system monitor it must appear at the leftmost edge of the tree).

Answer 5

I always use fabric for this things like:

from fabric.operations import local
result = local('ls', capture=True)
print "Content:/n%s" % (result, )

But this seem to be a good tool: sh (Python subprocess interface).

Look an example:

from sh import vgdisplay
print vgdisplay()
print vgdisplay('-v')
print vgdisplay(v=True)

Answer 6

os.system does not allow you to store results, so if you want to store results in some list or something subprocess.call works.