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in many cases, you may need to execute shell commands from within a python script. this can be useful for automating tasks or interacting with system utilities. python provides several ways to achieve this, but one of the most common approaches is to use the subprocess module. in this tutorial, we will explore how to launch a shell command, wait for its termination, and return to the python script using the subprocess module.
before you begin, ensure that you have python installed on your system. the subprocess module is included in the python standard library, so you don't need to install any additional packages.
start by importing the subprocess module in your python script:
to launch a shell command from within your python script, you can use the subprocess.run() function. this function takes the command you want to run as a string or a list of strings, depending on how you want to execute it.
in this example, we use the shell=true argument to run the command in a shell. the check=true argument raises a calledprocesserror if the command exits with a non-zero status code (indicating an error).
here, we provide the command and its arguments as a list of strings.
by default, subprocess.run() will wait for the command to complete before returning to the script. this means your python script will pause until the shell command finishes executing.
you can capture the output of the shell command by specifying stdout=subprocess.pipe when calling subprocess.run(). this allows you to work with the output within your python script.
in this example, we set stdout=subprocess.pipe and use text=true to capture the output as a string.
you can also obtain the exit code of the shell command using result.returncode. a return code of 0 typically indicates success, while non-zero values indicate an error.
in this tutorial, you learned how to launch a shell command from within a python script using the subprocess module, wait for its termination, capture its output, and access the exit ...