Assign output of os.system to a variable and preve

Question

I want to assign the output of a command I run using os.system to a variable and prevent it from being output to the screen. But, in the below code ,the output is sent to the screen and the value printed for var is 0, which I guess signifies whether the command ran successfully or not. Is there any way to assign the command output to the variable and also stop it from being displayed on the screen?

var = os.system("cat /etc/services")
print var #Prints 0

Answer 1

i do it with os.system temp file:

import tempfile,os
def readcmd(cmd):
    ftmp = tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile(suffix='.out', prefix='tmp', delete=False)
    fpath = ftmp.name
    if os.name=="nt":
        fpath = fpath.replace("/","\\") # forwin
    ftmp.close()
    os.system(cmd + " > " + fpath)
    data = ""
    with open(fpath, 'r') as file:
        data = file.read()
        file.close()
    os.remove(fpath)
    return data