How to use subprocess when multiple arguments contain spaces?

Question

I\'m working on a wrapper script that will exercise a vmware executable, allowing for the automation of virtual machine startup/shutdown/register/deregister actions. I\'m t

Answer 1

One problem is that if the command is surrounded with quotes and doesn't have spaces, that could also confuse the shell.

So I do this:

if ' ' in raw_cmd:
    fmt = '"%s"'
else:
    fmt = '%s'

cmd = fmt % raw_cmd

Answer 2

If you have spaces in the path, the easiest way I've found to get them interpreted properly is this.

subprocess.call('""' + path + '""')

I don't know why exactly it needs double double quotes, but that is what works.

Answer 3

Why are you using r""? I believe that if you remove the "r" from the beginning, it will be treated as a standard string which may contain spaces. Python should then properly quote the string when sending it to the shell.

Answer 4

2 things

1)

You probably don't want to use Pipe If the output of the subprogram is greater than 64KB it is likely your process will crash. http://thraxil.org/users/anders/posts/2008/03/13/Subprocess-Hanging-PIPE-is-your-enemy/

2) Subprocess.Popen has a keyword argument shell, making it as if the shell has been parsing your arguments, setting shell=True should do what you want.