Assign output of os.system to a variable and prevent it from being displayed on the screen [duplicate]

Answer 1

You might also want to look at the subprocess module, which was built to replace the whole family of Python popen-type calls.

import subprocess
output = subprocess.check_output("cat /etc/services", shell=True)

The advantage it has is that there is a ton of flexibility with how you invoke commands, where the standard in/out/error streams are connected, etc.

Answer 2

I know this has already been answered, but I wanted to share a potentially better looking way to call Popen via the use of from x import x and functions:

from subprocess import PIPE, Popen


def cmdline(command):
    process = Popen(
        args=command,
        stdout=PIPE,
        shell=True
    )
    return process.communicate()[0]

print cmdline("cat /etc/services")
print cmdline('ls')
print cmdline('rpm -qa | grep "php"')
print cmdline('nslookup google.com')