How do you conver output of "popen('ls')" to a list?

[Michael Hudson]

grante at visi.com (Grant Edwards) writes:

> Maybe I'm a bit too paranoid, but using os.system() seems to me
> to be begging for problems down the road.  If you explicitly
> want shell-command-line semantics then it's cool, but most of
> the places I see it used (including in my code) there are more
> robust solutions.

Hmm.  I find myself doing this sort of thing "by hand" (i.e. calling
pipe/fork/dup2/exec/waitpid directly) more and more at the moment
because none of the library solutions are quite flexible enough.
Yesterday I wanted to cd into a directory (without affecting the
parent), run a subprocess, pipe its output into another subprocess and
wait for the latter process to finish.

Would it be possible to design an elegant library that allowed this
much control?  Certainly, I don't think I've seen any that allow
specifying the working directory, though this wouldn't be hard.

Cheers,
M.

-- 
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