Running command lines within your Python script

Question

So I have a bunch of aliases and Command Line prompt programs, and my main program works by inputting b into the cmd.exe, followed by some filepath names and what not. How would I run those arguments in my python script? So that it mimics the action i am doing in the cmd?

• Levon: Can you give some examples? cmd.exe is this under Windows, talk of aliases made me think it was Linux/Unix.
• user2315: Yes this is Windows. For example I would run a command "b Y TUP TUP010" b being the program, Y the drive, TUP the directory, and TUP010 the subdirectory

Answer 1

You should use the subprocess module. In particular, subprocess.call will run command line programs for you.

Answer 2

or you can use

import os
os.system('your_command')

for example:

import os
os.system('notepad')

will launch the notepad with the command line behind.

hope this helps

• Jakob Bowyer: The subprocess module provides more powerful facilities for spawning new processes and retrieving their results; using that module is preferable to using this function. See the Replacing Older Functions with the subprocess Module section in the subprocess documentation for some helpful recipes.
• user2315: I've set up an alias so that when I type maya it opens an animation software maya. Yet when I do this, it works for notepad, but not for maya.
• Infinite_Loop: I agree subprocess is way better.

Answer 3

You can do this using subprocess

For example, this call bellow gets the output of the program and stores it as a string, using .call will help with calling it and for more accurate control use .Popen

subprocess.check_output(["ipconfig"])

Answer 4

Check out Sarge - a wrapper for subprocess which aims to make life easier for anyone who needs to interact with external applications from their Python code. and Plumbum - a small yet feature-rich library for shell script-like programs in Python.