Easy way to store stdout to a variable?

[mike]

Thanks Alex.  That worked great.
-mike

Alex Martelli <aleax at aleax.it> wrote in message news:<fSWaa.32905$pG1.776432 at news1.tin.it>...
> mike wrote:
>    ...
> > unix pipes and filters, e.g. "ls *.txt | grep -v old | wc -l".
> > 
> > I know I can use "os.system()" to invoke system calls, but I don't
>  ...
> > So what is an easy one-liner way to store stdout of a sytem-call to a
> > variable?
> 
>     thevar = os.popen('ls *.txt | grep -v old | wc -l').read()
> 
> 
> Alex