[Tutor] Popen? or something else

[Roger Merchberger]

Rumor has it that Ertl, John may have mentioned these words:
>All,
>
>I hate to ask this but I have just installed 2.4 and I need to get some info
>from a subprocess (I think that is correct term).
>
>At the Linux command line if I input dtg I get back a string representing a
>date time group.  How do I do this in Python?  I would think Popen but I
>just don't see it.

It could, but there's also a better (IMHO), 'pythonic' way, something like 
this:

def gettoday():

  import time
  today = time.strftime('%Y%m%d%H',time.localtime(time.time()))
  return (today)

>$ dtg
>2004122212

If you wanted to use popen, it would look rather like this:

import os
dtg_s = os.popen("/path/to/dtg").readlines()[0]

But this may use more system resources (spawning child shells & whatnot) 
than doing everything internally with the time module in Python.

HTH,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger

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Roger "Merch" Merchberger   | A new truth in advertising slogan
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