os.popen command working differently on Windows

[Ayaskanta Swain]

Hi All,

 

Please help me in solving the following issue I am facing while
executing my python script. Basically I am executing the OS specific
move command to move a file/dir from one location to another. I am
executing the 'mv' command on linux & the 'move' DOS command on windows
machine from my python script. Everything works fine on linux & windows
, but the script fails to detect a particular error situation on
Windows, which is very important for my application.

 

Normally the move operation fails if we try to move a directory to a
location where the same directory already exists. That means overwriting
of directories is not allowed by the OS for move operation.

For example on Windows command prompt - "move  /Y  C:\temp\my_dir
C:\stage\profiles\" will fail with Access is Denied message if
C:\stage\profiles\ already contains my_dir inside it. It is an expected
OS behavior. But the problem is that, this error message is not thrown
if the command is executed from a python script.

---

filemove.py script has the following code -

..................................................

import os

 

src = sys.argv[1]

dst = sys.argv[2]

 

# Using the DOS command 'move'. Adding quotes("") to avoid issues with
spaces in the path.

command = 'move' + ' ' + '/Y' + ' ' + '"' + src + '"' + ' ' + '"' + dst
+ '"'

 

try:

    os.popen(command)

except IOError:

    print 'fatal: failed to execute move command'

except OSError, err:

    print >> sys.stderr, "System Error while making a copy from " + src
+ " to " + dst

........................................................................
....................

The script executes without giving any error msg and returns 0 exit
code, but in the back ground the directory is not moved to the
destination. I am providing the source & destination values as command
line arguments to the script.

 

On Linux this type of use case gives me the OS error message "cannot
overwrite directory" which makes it easy for me to catch the error
message & return it the end user. But I wonder why is this not the case
on Windows. Any help to solve this will be great.

 

Thanks

Ayaskant-

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