better use of os.system()

[cmkl]

Fooman <fee at fee.com> wrote in message news:<181d118be52ffabbbeaa120340c3f759 at news.teranews.com>...
> > lower: not found
> > 
> > I want it to run "lower" just like it would if I typed "lower" at the
> > bash prompt.  How can I do that?
> 
> The problem is that the 'lower' script is not in the path that
> the python interpreter knows about.  You can do:
> 
> 	os.system("/my/nonstandard/pathto/lower")
> 
> or, if you are using Linux, or similar, you can try
> making sure that your $PATH variable is getting set to
> include the path to your script in the environment that
> the python interpreter gets launched in.
> 
> So, what platform are you running under, and what is the
> path to your 'lower' script, and what are the contents
> of your $PATH variable?
> 
> Tobiah

You can use the standard windows Python distribution with 
a little trick. First of all make sure you can start 'lower'
from a dos console.
To do that, you need a little helper cygwin shell script:

- start cygwin

- cd /bin

- create a cmd2bash script with the following content:

  #! /bin/bash
  $*

- chmod +x cmd2bash    (make it executable)

Then start a console and try out following command:

C:\>c:\cygwin\bin\bash c:\cygwin\bin\cmd2bash "ls -la"

Do you see the content of drive C:\ in posix style? 
You may need to adjust the path to cygwin.

If you have name with spaces (barf) you may need single quotes:
C:\Programme>c:\cygwin\bin\bash c:\cygwin\bin\cmd2bash "ls  'Outlook Express'"

Then try to start your lower script with:
os.system('''c:\cygwin\bin\bash c:\cygwin\bin\cmd2bash "lower"''')

btw: this trick works for msys too

Regards 

Carl