Popen subprocess.PIPE and its uses

Question

I know that this question may have been asked a lot but I am still not really getting it. Reading from this related link, I can understand why there is a need to add stdout=subprocess.PIPE at the end of the sentence so that the output result can be used into the next Popen.

Tried looking online, but I garner little to no knowledge about it as the ones I found are in the form of a documentation.

But if I am not using the output, is it really necessary to put stdout=subprocess.PIPE at the end? I tried executing it with and without the use of it, and it is still giving me the expected results that I wanted.

Hence what are the big differences whether subprocess.PIPE is present or not?

process = subprocess.Popen(command, stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
process.communicate()

Answer 1

Without subprocess.PIPE the output of command would be printed on STDOUT and process.communicate() should return None. Which python version are you using?

Can you paste the output?