system calling with arguments and pipe

Question

i have a text in variable called myText, and I want to run command like this:

myText = "This is my text"    
call("echo" + myText + " | mail username -s subj")

it means that I want to echo the text in myText and pass is to mail command thru pipe. what is right way to do this ?

Does this code work? If not, what does it do? What have you researched? — Justin Jasmann
– Justin Jasmann, Commented Oct 7, 2013 at 14:31
Did you already do from subprocess import call? If so, all you're missing is to surround myText with quotes, like call("echo '" + myText + "' | mail username -s subj") — David Robinson
– David Robinson, Commented Oct 7, 2013 at 14:32

Mike DeSimone · Accepted Answer · 2013-10-07 14:46:31Z

3

You should have a look to os command such as popen that allows you to create a pipe to make processes communicate between each other. Check out this page

from subprocess import Popen, PIPE
p1 = Popen(['echo', myText], stdout=PIPE)
p2 = Popen('mail', stdin=p1.stdout)

This should work.

edited Oct 7, 2013 at 14:46

Mike DeSimone

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answered Oct 7, 2013 at 14:34

ibi0tux

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3 Comments

user2234234 Over a year ago

and how this "mail username -s subj" should be written instead of 'mail' in p2 = Popen('mail', stdin=p1.stdout) ?

tdelaney Over a year ago

This is good but needs waits on p1 and p2 to let the processes complete.

tdelaney Over a year ago

@user2234234 - it would be p2 = Popen(['mail', 'username', '-s', 'subj'], stdin=p1.stdout). This example calls mail directly, skipping an intermediate shell, so it needs to break each argument out into a list.

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