getting a string as the return value from a system command

[Catherine Moroney]

Hello,

I want to call a system command (such as uname) that returns a string,
and then store that output in a string variable in my python program.

What is the recommended/most-concise way of doing this?

I could always create a temporary file, call the "subprocess.Popen"
module with the temporary file as the stdout argument, and then
re-open that temporary file and read in its contents.  This seems
to be awfully long way of doing this, and I was wondering about 
alternate ways of accomplishing this task.

In pseudocode, I would like to be able to do something like:
hostinfo = subprocess.Popen("uname -srvi") and have hostinfo
be a string containing the result of issuing the uname command.

Thanks for any tips,

Catherine