os.system and subprocess odd behavior

[py_genetic]

Example of the issue for arguments sake:

Platform Ubuntu server 12.04LTS, python 2.7

Say file1.txt has "hello world" in it.

subprocess.Popen("cat < file1 > file2", shell = True)
subprocess.call("cat < file1 > file2", shell = True)
os.system("cat < file1 > file2")


I'm finding that file2 IS created, but with 0bytes in it, this happens when I try any sort of cmd to the system of the nature where I'm putting the output into a file.

I've made sure it isn't a permission issue.  The command runs fine from the cmd line and python is being run with super user privileges. Strait from the terminal I get a hello world copy as file2... as expected.

I would like python to simply exec the cmd and move on.... I don't want to read and write the stdout ect into python and write it to a file.  Any thoughts as to why this creates file2, but no data appears?  Is there a better way to do this?

Thank you!