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I have a question regarding the use of Python.

How do i run a command line command using Python? And after running the command, how do i save the returned values?

For example:

user@home:~$: ls -l
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 ..[etc] home
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 357 ..[etc] examples.doc

So what i intend to do, is to run the command ls -l and than save the response into a database using Python.

I intend to implement the above example in Django.

May I know if it is possible? What kind of commands I cannot execute?

How do i implement it?

Any links, tutorials, advice is more than welcome!

Best Regards.

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4 Answers 4

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You need to use subprocess -- http://docs.python.org/library/subprocess.html and http://docs.python.org/library/subprocess.html:

from subprocess import Popen, PIPE
stdout, stderr = Popen(['echo', 'Hello World!'], shell=False, stdout=PIPE)
print stdout.split('\n')
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2 Comments

looks great. how would i store the result into a database?
To store in a database, go through the django tutorial: docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/intro/tutorial01
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reece's answer almost works, but you need to append Popen with .communicate()

so it would be:

from subprocess import Popen, PIPE
stdout, stderr = Popen(['echo', 'Hello World!'], shell=False, stdout=PIPE).communicate()

Or in Python 2.7 you can use:

from subprocess import check_output
stdout = check_output(['echo', 'Hello World!'], shell=False)

See subprocess: http://docs.python.org/library/subprocess.html

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You're not actually asking the right question here. As others have said, os.system or subprocess.Popen are the answers to the question 'how can I run a shell command in Python.

But that's not the question you are really asking. What you actually want to know is, how can I get the files in a directory? And the answer to that question is to use os.listdir(). See the documentation.

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Check out the standard subprocess model - it has an example for doing just that:

http://docs.python.org/library/subprocess.html#replacing-shell-pipeline

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