[Tutor] piping to system commands

[Gabriel Farrell]

I'm trying to create a master dictionary in aspell, and I can do so
with the following:

    inFile = tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile()
    inFile.write(wordList)
    inFile.flush()
    command = 'aspell --lang=en --dont-validate-words create master %s < %s' % \
        ('./dict.cwl', inFile.name)
    os.system(command)

or, in 2.4, instead of os.system(command):
    
    retcode = subprocess.call(command, shell = True)

I'm wondering, is there a way to do this more directly, without the
need for a temp file, and in a way where I the stdout coming from
aspell won't go to sys.stdout?  The following seems to work, but the
end of the input gets cut off.

    command = 'aspell --lang=en --dont-validate-words create master ./dict.cwl'
    pipe = subprocess.Popen(command, stdin = subprocess.PIPE, shell=True).stdin
    pipe.write()
    pipe.flush()
    pipe.close()

gsf