getting a string as the return value from a system command

[Larry Hudson]

Catherine Moroney wrote:
> 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

import os
txt = os.popen("uname -srvi")
hostinfo = txt.readline()

Or if the command outputs a number of lines (such as 'ls'),
use txt.readlines() to put the result into a list of strings.

      -=- Larry -=-