How to return Paramiko exec_commmand as a string to python client [duplicate]

Question

So i'm putting together something that uses Paramiko to ssh into remote servers and send commands to the remote connection. Everything is going well so far except for the fact that I cant seem to get Paramiko to return the results of the executed command as a string. Paramiko is returning what looks like an instance of the channel and its status. this is what i'm trying right now:

client = paramiko.SSHClient()
client.load_system_host_keys()
client.set_missing_host_key_policy(paramiko.AutoAddPolicy())


hostname = 'xxxx'
port = 'xxxxx'
user = 'xxxxx'
password = 'xxxxx'


client.connect(hostname,port,user,password)
do_something(client)






def do_something(client):

    object = client.exec_command('pwd')
    print(object)

the following is what Paramiko is giving me as output when I run the program:

  (<paramiko.ChannelFile from <paramiko.Channel 0 (open) window=2097152 -> 
  <paramiko.Transport at 0x6119f90 (cipher aes128-ctr, 128 bits) (active; 1 
   open chanel(s))>>>,

and the desired output should be something like:

 object = client.exec_command('pwd')
 print(object)

ouput:

  '/var/www/html'

essentially if you enter a command how can I get Paramiko to return the string value instead of the object instance? I have tried a few different methods but I cant seem to get around this! Please Advise! very much appreciated!

Answer 1

From Paramiko's documentation for client.exec_command():

The command’s input and output streams are returned as Python file-like objects representing stdin, stdout, and stderr.

So you would need to grab that stdout stream, and read from it:

stdin, stdout, stderr = client.exec_command('pwd')
string = stdout.read().decode('ascii').strip("\n")