Best command for running shell command

[Roy Smith]

In article <0001HW.C0D95C2600E03045F0284530 at News.Individual.DE>,
 Donald Duck <bluejump at mac.com> wrote:

> 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 most straight-forward way would be:

import os
status = os.system ("xxxxxx -a -b > yyyyyy")
if status == 0:
   print "it worked"
else:
   print "it failed"

You might also want to look at the new (in 2.4) subprocess module.