Interacting with bash from python

Question

I've been playing around with Python's subprocess module and I wanted to do an "interactive session" with bash from python. I want to be able to read bash output/write commands from Python just like I do on a terminal emulator. I guess a code example explains it better:

>>> proc = subprocess.Popen(['/bin/bash'])
>>> proc.communicate()
('user@machine:~/','')
>>> proc.communicate('ls\n')
('file1 file2 file3','')

(obviously, it doesn't work that way.) Is something like this possible, and how?

Thanks a lot

Answer 1

Try with this example:

import subprocess

proc = subprocess.Popen(['/bin/bash'], stdin=subprocess.PIPE, stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
stdout = proc.communicate('ls -lash')

print stdout

You have to read more about stdin, stdout and stderr. This looks like good lecture: http://www.doughellmann.com/PyMOTW/subprocess/

EDIT:

Another example:

>>> process = subprocess.Popen(['/bin/bash'], shell=False, stdin=subprocess.PIPE, stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
>>> process.stdin.write('echo it works!\n')
>>> process.stdout.readline()
'it works!\n'
>>> process.stdin.write('date\n')
>>> process.stdout.readline()
'wto, 13 mar 2012, 17:25:35 CET\n'
>>>