execute bash builtins in python

[alex goretoy]

hi,
i'm trying to write a section of my program that needs to run bash builtin
alias and declare, i've googled and tried every type of example i could find
no to avail. this is what I've tried below and it doesn't work, is there a
way for me to execute a bah builin from python? what i need is to take alias
output and pipe it to another command with python and return the results to
a string or list.

>>> p1=Popen(["alias"],stdout=PIPE)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/subprocess.py", line 621, in __init__
    errread, errwrite)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/subprocess.py", line 1126, in _execute_child
    raise child_exception
OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory

if i add shell=True i get empty string and no thins error message

>>> p1=Popen(["alias"],stdout=PIPE,shell=True)
>>> p1
<subprocess.Popen object at 0xb7589a4c>
>>> p1.stdout.read()
''

thank you,
-Alex Goretoy
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