Using wildcards with Popen in the Subprocess module

[Sion Arrowsmith]

William Hudspeth  <wbhk at unm.edu> wrote:
> [ ... ] I need to pass multiple filenames to an
>executable. The filenames are similar to one another, but differ only
>slightly, hence the use of the wildcard. The executable works well from
>the command line if I pass in a wildcard filename, but Popen can't
>expand the wildcard.
>
>>From command line:
>% command /path_to_files/filename*.doc
>
>With Popen:
>var1="/path_to_files/filnames*.doc"
>result=Popen(["command",var1]).wait()

You want:

result = Popen(["command", var1], shell=True).wait()

See the subprocess docs on using Popen instead of "older functions"
(especially os.system): http://docs.python.org/lib/node534.html .
You might also want a look at subprocess.call() .

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