6/22/2020 How to Execute Shell Commands with Python - Parametric Thoughts

Parametric Thoughts

How to Execute Shell

Commands with Python
22 Apr 2019

Python is a wonderful language for scripting and

automating work ows and it is packed with useful tools
out of the box with the Python Standard Library. A
common thing to do, especially for a sysadmin, is to
execute shell commands. But what usually will end up in a
bash or batch le, can be also done in Python. You’ll learn
here how to do just that with the os and subprocess
modules.

Using the os Module

The rst and the most straight forward approach to run a
shell command is by using os.system():

import os
os.system('ls -l')

If you save this as a script and run it, you will see the
output in the command line. The problem with this
approach is in its in exibility since you can’t even get the
resulting output as a variable. You can read more about
this function in the documentation.

Note, that if you run this function in Jupyter notebook,

you won’t have an output inline. Instead you the inline
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output will be the return code of the executed programm

( 0 for successful and -1 for unsuccessful). You will nd
the output in the command line where you have started
Jupyter notebook.

Next, the os.popen() command opens a pipe from or to the

command line. This means that we can access the stream
within Python. This is useful since you can now get the
output as a variable:

import os
stream = os.popen('echo Returned output')
output = stream.read()
output

'Returned output\n'

When you use the .read() function, you will get the
whole output as one string. You can also use the
.readlines() function, which splits each line (including
a trailing \n ). Note, that you can run them only once. It
is also possible to write to the stream by using the
mode='w' argument. To delve deeper into this function,
have a look at the documentation.

In this example and in the following examples, you will

see that you always have trailing line breaks in the output.
To remove them (including blank spaces and tabs in the
beginning and end) you can use the .strip() function
like with output.strip() . To remove those characters
only in the beginning use .lstrip() and for the end
.rstrip() .

Using the subprocess

Module
The nal approach is also the most versatile approach and
the recommended module to run external commands in
Python:

The subprocess module provides more

powerful facilities for spawning new
processes and retrieving their results; using
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that module is preferable to using this

function. See the Replacing Older
Functions with the subprocess Module
section in the subprocess documentation
for some helpful recipes. (Source)

The main function you want to keep in mind if you use

Python >= 3.5 is subprocess.run(), but before we get there
let’s go through the functionality of the subprocess
module. The subprocess.Popen() class is responsible for
the creation and management of the executed process. In
contrast to the previous functions, this class executes only
a single command with arguments as a list. This means
that you won’t be able to pipe commands:

import subprocess
process = subprocess.Popen(['echo', 'More output'],
stdout=subprocess.PIPE,
stderr=subprocess.PIPE)
stdout, stderr = process.communicate()
stdout, stderr

(b'More output\n', b'')

You’ll notice that we set stdout and stderr to

subprocess.PIPE. This is a special value that indicates to
subprocess.Popen that a pipe should be opened that you
can then read with the .communicate() function. It is
also possible to use a le object as with:

with open('test.txt', 'w') as f:

process = subprocess.Popen(['ls', '-l'], stdout=f)

Another thing that you’ll notice is that the output is of

type bytes. You can solve that by typing
stdout.decode('utf-8') or by adding
universal_newlines=True when calling
subprocess.Popen .

When you run .communicate() , it will wait until the

process is complete. However if you have a long program
that you want to run and you want to continuously check
the status in realtime while doing something else, you can
do this like here:

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process = subprocess.Popen(['ping', '-c 4', 'python.org'],

stdout=subprocess.PIPE,
universal_newlines=True)

while True:
output = process.stdout.readline()
print(output.strip())
# Do something else
return_code = process.poll()
if return_code is not None:
print('RETURN CODE', return_code)
# Process has finished, read rest of the output
for output in process.stdout.readlines():
print(output.strip())
break

PING python.org (45.55.99.72) 56(84) bytes of data.

64 bytes from 45.55.99.72 (45.55.99.72): icmp_seq=1 ttl=51 time=117 ms
64 bytes from 45.55.99.72 (45.55.99.72): icmp_seq=2 ttl=51 time=118 ms
64 bytes from 45.55.99.72 (45.55.99.72): icmp_seq=3 ttl=51 time=117 ms
64 bytes from 45.55.99.72 (45.55.99.72): icmp_seq=4 ttl=51 time=118 ms

--- python.org ping statistics ---

RETURN CODE 0
4 packets transmitted, 4 received, 0% packet loss, time 3001ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 117.215/117.874/118.358/0.461 ms

You can use the .poll() function to check the return

code of the process. It will return None while the process
is still running. To get the output, you can use
process.stdout.readline() to read a single line.
Conversely, when you use
process.stdout.readlines() , it reads all lines and it
also waits for the process to nish if it has not nished
yet. For more information on the functionionality of
subprocess.Popen , have a look at the documentation.

Also note, that you won’t need quotations for arguments

with spaces in between like '\"More output\"' . If you
are unsure how to tokenize the arguments from the
command, you can use the shlex.split() function:

import shlex
shlex.split("/bin/prog -i data.txt -o \"more data.txt\"")

['/bin/prog', '-i', 'data.txt', '-o', 'more data.txt']

You have also the subprocess.call() function to your

disposal which works like the Popen class, but it waits
until the command completes and gives you the return
code as in return_code = subprocess.call(['echo',

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'Even more output']) . The recommended way however

is to use subprocess.run() which works since Python 3.5. It
has been added as a simpli cation of subprocess.Popen .
The function will return a subprocess.CompletedProcess
object:

process = subprocess.run(['echo', 'Even more output'],

stdout=subprocess.PIPE,
universal_newlines=True)
process

CompletedProcess(args=['echo', 'Even more output'], returncode=0, stdo

You can now nd the resulting output in this variable:

process.stdout

'Even more output\n'

Similar to subprocess.call() and the previous

.communicate() function, it will wait untill the process
is completed. Finally, here is a more advanced example on
how to access a server with ssh and the subprocess
module:

import subprocess

ssh = subprocess.Popen(["ssh", "-i .ssh/id_rsa", "user@host"],

stdin =subprocess.PIPE,
stdout=subprocess.PIPE,
stderr=subprocess.PIPE,
universal_newlines=True,
bufsize=0)

# Send ssh commands to stdin

ssh.stdin.write("uname -a\n")
ssh.stdin.write("uptime\n")
ssh.stdin.close()

# Fetch output
for line in ssh.stdout:
print(line.strip())

Here you can see how to write input to the process. In this
case you need to set the bufsize=0 in order to have
unbuffered output. After you are nished writing to the
stdin , you need to close the connection.

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Conclusion
You have seen now how to run external commands in
Python. The most effective way is to use the subprocess
module with all the functionality it offers. Most notably,
you should consider using subprocess.run . For a short
and quick script you might just want to use the
os.system() or os.popen() functions. If you have any
questions, feel free to leave them in the comments below.
There are also other useful libraries that support shell
commands in Python, like plumbum, sh, psutils and
pexpect.

Further Reading
4 Techniques for Testing Python Command-Line
(CLI) Apps
Frequently Used Arguments - subprocess

Image from Wikimedia Commons

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