Is this the right way to run a shell script inside Python?

Question

import subprocess
retcode = subprocess.call([\"/home/myuser/go.sh\", \"abc.txt\", \"xyz.txt\"])

When I run these 2 lines, will I be doing exactly t

Answer 1

Change the code to following:

retcode = subprocess.call(["/home/myuser/go.sh", "abc.txt", "xyz.txt"], shell=True,)

Notice "shell=True"

From: http://docs.python.org/library/subprocess.html#module-subprocess

On Unix, with shell=True: If args is a string, it specifies the command string to execute through the shell. This means that the string must be formatted exactly as it would be when typed at the shell prompt.

Answer 2

Yes, this is the preferred way to execute something..

Since you are passing all arguments through an array (which will be used gor an exec()-style call internally) and not as an argument string evaluated by a shell it's also very secure as injection of shell commands is impossible.

Answer 3

Yes, that's perfectly fine if all you're doing is calling the shell script, waiting for it to complete, and gathering its exit status, while letting its stdin, stdout, and stderr be inherited from your Python process. If you need more control over any of those factors, then you just use the more general subprocess.Popen, but otherwise what you have is fine.

Answer 4

I just got this error on Mac OS, while trying to call a one-line script using subprocess.call. The script ran fine when called from the command line. After adding the shebang line #!/usr/bin/env sh, it also ran fine via subprocess.call.

It appears, while the shell has a default executor for text files marked executable, subprocess.Popen does not.

Answer 5

I recently ran into this problem with a script that looked like this:

% cat /tmp/test.sh
                              <-- Note the empty line
#!/bin/sh
mkdir /tmp/example

The script ran fine from the command line, but failed with

OSError: [Errno 8] Exec format error

when executed via

subprocess.Popen(['/tmp/test.sh']).communicate()

(The solution, of course, was to remove the empty line).

Answer 6

OSError: [Errno 8] Exec format error

This is an error reported by the operating system when trying to run /home/myuser/go.sh.

It looks to me like the shebang (#!) line of go.sh is not valid.

Here's a sample script that runs from the shell but not from Popen:

#\!/bin/sh
echo "You've just called $0 $@."

Removing the \ from the first line fixes the problem.