Python Script execute commands in Terminal

Question

There are several ways to do this:

A simple way is using the os module:

import os
os.system("ls -l")

More complex things can be achieved with the subprocess module: for example:

import subprocess
test = subprocess.Popen(["ping","-W","2","-c", "1", "192.168.1.70"], stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
output = test.communicate()[0]

I prefer usage of subprocess module:

from subprocess import call
call(["ls", "-l"])

Reason is that if you want to pass some variable in the script this gives very easy way for example take the following part of the code

abc = a.c
call(["vim", abc])

• Custom standard input for python subprocess

In fact any question on subprocess will be a good read

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/subprocess

import os
os.system("echo 'hello world'")

This should work. I do not know how to print the output into the python Shell.

You should also look into commands.getstatusoutput

This returns a tuple of length 2.. The first is the return integer ( 0 - when the commands is successful ) second is the whole output as will be shown in the terminal.

For ls

    import commands
    s=commands.getstatusoutput('ls')
    print s
    >> (0, 'file_1\nfile_2\nfile_3')
    s[1].split("\n")
    >> ['file_1', 'file_2', 'file_3']