Best command for running shell command

[Donald Duck]

I'm a little bit confused about what is the best way to run a shell command, 
if I want to run a command like

			xxxxxx -a -b > yyyyyy

where I'm not interested in the output, I only want to make sure that the 
command was executed OK. How should I invoke this (in a Unix/linux 
environment)?

The command module seem to give the resulting output and the various popen 
commands seem to be similar.