How to use subprocess popen Python [duplicate]

Question

subprocess.Popen takes a list of arguments:

from subprocess import Popen, PIPE

process = Popen(['swfdump', '/tmp/filename.swf', '-d'], stdout=PIPE, stderr=PIPE)
stdout, stderr = process.communicate()

There's even a section of the documentation devoted to helping users migrate from os.popen to subprocess.

Use sh, it'll make things a lot easier:

import sh
print sh.swfdump("/tmp/filename.swf", "-d")

In the recent Python version, subprocess has a big change. It offers a brand-new class Popen to handle os.popen1|2|3|4.

The new subprocess.Popen()

import subprocess
subprocess.Popen('ls -la', shell=True)

Its arguments:

subprocess.Popen(args, 
                bufsize=0, 
                executable=None, 
                stdin=None, stdout=None, stderr=None, 
                preexec_fn=None, close_fds=False, 
                shell=False, 
                cwd=None, env=None, 
                universal_newlines=False, 
                startupinfo=None, 
                creationflags=0)

Simply put, the new Popen includes all the features which were split into 4 separate old popen.

The old popen:

Method  Arguments
popen   stdout
popen2  stdin, stdout
popen3  stdin, stdout, stderr
popen4  stdin, stdout and stderr

You could get more information in Stack Abuse - Robert Robinson. Thank him for his devotion.

It may not be obvious how to break a shell command into a sequence of arguments, especially in complex cases. shlex.split() can do the correct tokenization for args (I'm using Blender's example of the call):

import shlex
from subprocess import Popen, PIPE
command = shlex.split('swfdump /tmp/filename.swf/ -d')
process = Popen(command, stdout=PIPE, stderr=PIPE)
stdout, stderr = process.communicate()

https://docs.python.org/3/library/subprocess.html