On 13/05/2011 12:03, vijay swaminathan wrote:
1. The class definition as per the documentation is: /class /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/) /args/ should be a string, or a sequence of program arguments. so I assume that args can be a string or a list with first item of the list being the program to execute.
That's more or less correct. A list is usually preferable as it leaves the heavy-lifting of getting the quotes right to the underlying library.
so on the python IDLE, I executed this command, >>> subprocess.Popen('cmd.exe') <subprocess.Popen object at 0x00F5AA50> which opened up a command prompt. when I give this as a list, as below it throwed this error. >>> subprocess.Popen(['cmd.exe', 'dir']) Traceback (most recent call last): File "<pyshell#29>", line 1, in <module> subprocess.Popen(['cmd.exe' 'dir']) File "C:\Python26\lib\subprocess.py", line 623, in __init__ errread, errwrite) File "C:\Python26\lib\subprocess.py", line 833, in _execute_child startupinfo) WindowsError: [Error 2] The system cannot find the file specified
Well I would actually have expected it to open a command prompt and do nothing else. If you do this in a (Windows) command prompt: cmd /? you can see that the way to run a command from with a command shell is to use: cmd /c <whatever> (or /k which leaves the console running afterwards). Note that you only even need to launch cmd for internal commands which aren't executables in their own right. ie you don't need to do cmd /c notepad since notepad can run on its own. So doing cmd <whatever> will just run cmd and, I think, ignore the rest of the line. You actually want: import subprocess subprocess.Popen (["cmd", "/c", "dir"]) However, that is exactly what passing shell=True to Popen does for you so... import subprocess subprocess.Popen ("dir", shell=True) # or subprocess.Popen (["dir"], shell=True) TJG -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list