How to schedule system calls with Python

[Ishwor Gurung]

Jeremy,
Hi

> I need to write a Python script that will call some command line
> programs (using os.system).  I will have many such calls, but I want
> to control when the calls are made.  I won't know in advance how long
> each program will run and I don't want to have 10 programs running
> when I only have one or two processors.  I want to run one at a time
> (or two if I have two processors), wait until it's finished, and then
> call the next one.

Right.

> How can I use Python to schedule these commands?
If I were as lucky as you, I would have used multiprocessing module[1]
(my platform does not have sem_open() syscall). Others suggestions are
as good as it can be but yeah you could get a lot of work done using
multiprocessing module(all the relevant bits are explained in the
module doc).

[1] http://docs.python.org/library/multiprocessing.html
-- 
Regards,
Ishwor Gurung