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I'm a little bit confused about what is the best way to run a shell command,
if I want to run a command like

xxxxxx -a -b > yyyyyy

where I'm not interested in the output, I only want to make sure that the
command was executed OK. How should I invoke this (in a Unix/linux
environment)?

The command module seem to give the resulting output and the various popen
commands seem to be similar.

In article < E>,
Donald Duck <> wrote:

> I'm a little bit confused about what is the best way to run a shell command,
> if I want to run a command like
>
> xxxxxx -a -b > yyyyyy
>
> where I'm not interested in the output, I only want to make sure that the
> command was executed OK. How should I invoke this (in a Unix/linux
> environment)?

The most straight-forward way would be:

import os
status = os.system ("xxxxxx -a -b > yyyyyy")
if status == 0:
print "it worked"
else:
print "it failed"

You might also want to look at the new (in 2.4) subprocess module.

Yes, I highly recommend the subprocess module. subprocess.call() can
do almost anything you want to do, and the options are all pretty
intuitive Whenever I need to write quick scripts for myself, it's what
I use.

THN


Roy Smith wrote:
> In article < E>,
> Donald Duck <> wrote:
>
> > I'm a little bit confused about what is the best way to run a shell command,
> > if I want to run a command like
> >
> > xxxxxx -a -b > yyyyyy
> >
> > where I'm not interested in the output, I only want to make sure that the
> > command was executed OK. How should I invoke this (in a Unix/linux
> > environment)?
>
> The most straight-forward way would be:
>
> import os
> status = os.system ("xxxxxx -a -b > yyyyyy")
> if status == 0:
> print "it worked"
> else:
> print "it failed"
>
> You might also want to look at the new (in 2.4) subprocess module.

> where I'm not interested in the output, I only want to make sure that the
> command was executed OK. How should I invoke this (in a Unix/linux
> environment)?

Remember few things about executing program within python
1. Create a subprocess or child process and execute it.
2. You should use "Timeout stratagy" i.e your execution took more than
provided time then timeout this process. In linux/unix you may use
singnal alarm to implement it.

Best!