Subprocess Call works on Windows, but not Ubuntu

Brett Bowman bnbowman at gmail.com
Tue Nov 23 14:28:56 EST 2010


I ran into an interesting problem trying to spawn a subprocess, so I thought
I'd ask if the experts could explain it to me.  I'm spawning a subprocess to
run "pdf2txt.py", which is a tool that is distributed with PDFminer to do
moderately advanced text-dumps of PDFs.  Yet when I run the same code on my
two dev machines - one Win XP, the other Ubuntu 10.04 or 10.10 - it only
works on the former and not the later. And its not terribly complicated
code.

# Code Start
sp_line = 'python pdf2txt.py -p 1 -o %s "%s"' % ('temp.out', pdf_filename)
print sp_line
sp = subprocess.Popen(sp_line)
sp.wait()
with open('temp.out', 'r') as pdf_handle:
    #Do stuff to read the file

The output from the print statements reads:
python pdf2txt.py -p 1 -o temp.out "Aarts et al (2009).pdf"

That command works on both systems when copied directly to the command-line,
and the python script it is a part of works on the Windows machine, but I
can't the script to work on Ubuntu for the life of me.  What am I missing?

/b/
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