How to write a subprocess.Popen terminal execution

Question

I want to kill a process on a remote server with another user, who creted the process via python with the subprocess.Popen command. But there is something I must be doing wrong because nothing happens when I run:

subprocess.Popen(['sudo','kill','-9',str(pid)], stdout=subprocess.PIPE)

In terminal sudo kill -9 pid works fine.

Do you get any error? How are you passing the sudo password? — heemayl
– heemayl, Commented Jun 26, 2019 at 14:02
@heemayl No error, but you are right I have somehow pass the sudo password' But how? — Varlor
– Varlor, Commented Jun 26, 2019 at 14:07
@Legorooj Tried this one too, nothing happens, I think heemayl is right I need to pass the sudo password somehow — Varlor
– Varlor, Commented Jun 26, 2019 at 14:08
@Sav Varlor probably doesn't want passwordless sudo as a default on their machine. — Legorooj
– Legorooj, Commented Jun 26, 2019 at 14:12

Mad Wombat · Accepted Answer · 2019-08-08 20:28:02Z

1

Your answer works. A slightly more formal way of doing this would be something like

from subprocess import Popen, PIPE


def kill(pid, passwd):
    pipe = Popen(['sudo', '-S', 'kill', '-9', str(pid)], 
                 stdout=PIPE, 
                 stdin=PIPE, 
                 stderr=PIPE)
    pipe.stdin.write(bytes(passwd + '\n', encoding='utf-8'))
    pipe.stdin.flush()
    # at this point, the process is killed, return output and errors
    return (str(pipe.stdout.read()), str(pipe.stderr.read()))

If I were writing this for a production system, I would add some exception handling, so treat this as a proof of concept.

answered Aug 8, 2019 at 20:28

Mad Wombat

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1 Comment

Legorooj Over a year ago

Definitely an improvement - much safer from a security point of view.

Varlor · Accepted Answer · 2019-06-26 14:32:12Z

0

Ok i got the answer thanks to the comment by Legorooj.

from subprocess import call
import os
command = 'kill -9 '+str(pid)
#p = os.system('echo {}|sudo -S {}'.format(password, command))
call('echo {} | sudo -S {}'.format(password, command), shell=True)

answered Jun 26, 2019 at 14:32

Varlor

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1 Comment

Legorooj Over a year ago

Good to know that I helped! Btw you should select this as the correct answer, that way it'll show up as answered.

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