Program to open command prompt

Question

I'm attempting to write a python script that will open the command prompt and change directories to a git initialized folder and return the git status. For right now I'd like help with how to just show the current directories so I can try and work through the solution myself.

import subprocess

p = subprocess.Popen(['cmd.exe','dir'])

I expected this to show me my current directories but it just returns what I normally see when I open the command prompt. What would be the proper way to do this and pass on multiple commands?

did you try to run "cmd.exe dir" in command line to see how it works ? You can also check "cmd.exe --help" - probably it should show what options you can use with "cmd.exe" — furas
– furas, Commented Aug 7, 2019 at 23:26
"FileNotFoundError: [WinError 2] The system cannot find the file specified" was the error I received when I tried that. — Zane Benson
– Zane Benson, Commented Aug 7, 2019 at 23:45

Saritus · Accepted Answer · 2019-08-07 23:44:48Z

2

Instead of explicitly using cmd.exe inside of Popen, you could use shell=True, which basically does the same (and is way better considering you might want to execute your script on different operating systems).

If you want to get the results of your executed command, you can redirect the output with the stdout and stderr parameter to subprocess.PIPE, which than can be grabbed with p.stdout.readlines().

So your required solution would be

import subprocess

p = subprocess.Popen('dir', shell=True, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.STDOUT)
for line in p.stdout.readlines():
    print(line)

answered Aug 7, 2019 at 23:44

Saritus

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