Shell command fails from python, ok from shell

Question

I have a python script that generates a number of shell commands from the given input. The problem is that when it tries to execute the generated commands, it fails, but when i

Answer 1

I believe what you do is you start a single program called find with many parameters, incl. | and grep and xargs - and these are not arguments to find.

What you want to do is probably to ask bash to run find and then pipe the outcome to grep, etc. One way to do that is to execute a single command called bash with two parameters (-c) and a whole string incl. piped commands, e.g.

process = subprocess.Popen(["bash", "-c", "cat /etc/issue | grep a"], stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
output=process.communicate()[0]
print output