a popen question. Please help

Chris Rebert clp2 at rebertia.com
Sun Aug 30 07:49:17 EDT 2009


On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 4:43 AM, Tim Chase<python.list at tim.thechases.com> wrote:
>> texts = os.popen('top').readlines()
>> print texts
>>
>> It calls the command line "top" and will print out some texts.
>> But first I have to press the keyboard "q" to quit the subprocess "top",
>> then the texts will be printed, otherwise it just stands by with blank.
>>
>> Question
>> is. Do you know how to give "q" into my python script so that "top" is
>> automatically quit immediately or maybe after 1s and print out the texts.
>
> Well as a workaround, my version of top (on Debian) supports a "-n"
> parameter so you can tell it how many iterations you want it to perform
> before quitting.  So you should be able to just use
>
>  os.popen('top -n1').readlines()

Hm, interesting. On Mac OS X's (and BSD's?) top, -n instead specifies
the number of processes to list at a time (i.e. list only the top N
processes), which is entirely different.

Cheers,
Chris



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