help needed with subprocess, pipes and parameters

[nuffi]

If I copy and paste the following command into a command window,   it does what I need.  

c:\Programs\bob\bob.exe -x -y "C:\text\path\to some\file.txt" | c:\Programs\kate\kate.exe -A 2 --dc "Print Media Is Dead" --da "Author" --dt "Title" --hf "Times" --bb "14" --aa "" --font "Ariel" - "C:\rtf\path\to some\file.rtf"

My mission is to recreate this command within a python script,  so that I can pass a bunch of different parameters into it,  and use it as a batch over a bunch of different papers.

http://docs.python.org/library/subprocess.html seems to be the thing to use in python 2.7.3.  I also checked out http://www.doughellmann.com/PyMOTW/subprocess/.

My attempts run fine,  create destination folders ok and prints done but don't actually seem to process the file.  Is there some way to get subprocess to output the command it's generating so I can see what I'm doing wrong,  rather than just the output of the command?

How can I chekc that kate's opening the pipe left from bob?    Bob may take some time to execute,  will that matter?


The code I came up with looks like this:

import os, glob, subprocess

sourceDir = "c:\\text\\"
destDir = "c:\\rtf\\"
bobPath = "C:\\Programs\\bob\\bob.exe"
katePath = "C:\\Programs\\kate\\kate.exe"

def get_new_path(doc):
    blah = doc.replace(sourceDir, destDir)
    if not os.path.isdir(blah):
        os.makedirs(blah)
    rtf = blah.replace('.txt', '.rtf')
    pathString = '- "' + (os.path.join(rtf)) + '"'
    return(pathString)


def convert_doc(doc):
    dc = '--dc "Print Media Is Dead"'
    da = '--da "Author"'
    dt = '--dt "Title"'
    hf = '--hf "Times"'
    fn = '--font "Ariel"'
    bb = '--bb "14"'
    docpath = '"' + (os.path.join(doc)) + '"'
    path = get_new_path(doc)
    A = '-A 2'
    bob = subprocess.Popen([bobPath, '-x', '-y', docpath], stdout = subprocess.PIPE,)
    kate = subprocess.Popen([katePath, A, dc, da, dt, hf, fn, bb, path], stdin = bob.stdout, stdout = subprocess.PIPE,)
    end_of_pipe = kate.stdout
    #print kate
    #subprocess.call(['echo', "Test peice of text", '>', 'D:\\output.txt'])
    for line in end_of_pipe:
        print '\t', blah.strip()
    #raw_input()
    return('done')


test = convert_doc("c:\\text\\path to\\some\\specific text file.txt")
print(blah)


==

Thanks for looking  :-)