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
From this question which I asked a long time ago, what you may want to use is popen:
os.popen('cat /etc/services').read()
From the docs for Python 3.6,
This is implemented using subprocess.Popen; see that class’s documentation for more powerful ways to manage and communicate with subprocesses.
Here's the corresponding code for subprocess:
import subprocess
proc = subprocess.Popen(["cat", "/etc/services"], stdout=subprocess.PIPE, shell=True)
(out, err) = proc.communicate()
print("program output:", out)
subprocess.check_output solution is closer to the Pythonic one-liner it seems you're looking for, as long as you don't care about stderr.
os.popen?
shell=True. See docs.python.org/3/library/…
shell=True, but it's also incorrect in this case. shell=True makes the shell the child process rather than cat, so out and err are the stdout/stderr of the shell process rather than of the cat processYou might also want to look at the subprocess module, which was built to replace the whole family of Python popen-type calls.
import subprocess
output = subprocess.check_output("cat /etc/services", shell=True)
The advantage it has is that there is a ton of flexibility with how you invoke commands, where the standard in/out/error streams are connected, etc.
check_output was added with python 2.7 docs.python.org/2.7/library/…
stderr=subprocess.STDOUT to capture standard errors as well
b'\r\nHost Name: DIMUTH-LAPTOP\r\nOS Name: Microsoft Windows 10 Pro\r\nOS Version: 10.0.10240 N/A Build 10240\r\nOS Manufacturer: Microsoft Corporation
output.decode("utf-8").split("\n") or whatever you´d like to do with it. You must convert it into a string first!The commands module is a reasonably high-level way to do this:
import commands
status, output = commands.getstatusoutput("cat /etc/services")
status is 0, output is the contents of /etc/services.
For python 3.5+ it is recommended that you use the run function from the subprocess module. This returns a CompletedProcess object, from which you can easily obtain the output as well as return code. Since you are only interested in the output, you can write a utility wrapper like this.
from subprocess import PIPE, run
def out(command):
result = run(command, stdout=PIPE, stderr=PIPE, universal_newlines=True, shell=True)
return result.stdout
my_output = out("echo hello world")
# Or
my_output = out(["echo", "hello world"])
result = run(command, stdout=PIPE, stderr=PIPE, universal_newlines=True, shell=True, capture_output=True) with capture_output injected returns: ValueError: stdout and stderr arguments may not be used with capture_output.I know this has already been answered, but I wanted to share a potentially better looking way to call Popen via the use of from x import x and functions:
from subprocess import PIPE, Popen
def cmdline(command):
process = Popen(
args=command,
stdout=PIPE,
shell=True
)
return process.communicate()[0]
print cmdline("cat /etc/services")
print cmdline('ls')
print cmdline('rpm -qa | grep "php"')
print cmdline('nslookup google.com')
cmd.py, and then in my main file I wrote from cmd import cmdline and used it as needed.
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
Python 2.6 and 3 specifically say to avoid using PIPE for stdout and stderr.
The correct way is
import subprocess
# must create a file object to store the output. Here we are getting
# the ssid we are connected to
outfile = open('/tmp/ssid', 'w');
status = subprocess.Popen(["iwgetid"], bufsize=0, stdout=outfile)
outfile.close()
# now operate on the file
from os import system, remove
from uuid import uuid4
def bash_(shell_command: str) -> tuple:
"""
:param shell_command: your shell command
:return: ( 1 | 0, stdout)
"""
logfile: str = '/tmp/%s' % uuid4().hex
err: int = system('%s &> %s' % (shell_command, logfile))
out: str = open(logfile, 'r').read()
remove(logfile)
return err, out
# Example:
print(bash_('cat /usr/bin/vi | wc -l'))
>>> (0, '3296\n')```
os.system(noros.popen, per the answer you accepted): usesubprocess.Popen, it's way better!subprocess.Popen-- just addshell=True!