Python Script execute commands in Terminal

Question

I read this somewhere a while ago but cant seem to find it. I am trying to find a command that will execute commands in the terminal and then output the result.

For

Answer 1

Jupyter

In a jupyter notebook you can use the magic function !

!echo "execute a command"
files = !ls -a /data/dir/ #get the output into a variable

ipython

To execute this as a .py script you would need to use ipython

files = get_ipython().getoutput('ls -a /data/dir/')

execute script

$ ipython my_script.py

Answer 2

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]

Answer 3

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']