36.16. commands — Utilities for running commands¶
Deprecated since version 2.6: The commands module has been removed in Python 3.  Use the
subprocess module instead.
The commands module contains wrapper functions for os.popen() which
take a system command as a string and return any output generated by the command
and, optionally, the exit status.
The subprocess module provides more powerful facilities for spawning new
processes and retrieving their results.  Using the subprocess module is
preferable to using the commands module.
Note
In Python 3.x, getstatus() and two undocumented functions
(mk2arg() and mkarg()) have been removed.  Also,
getstatusoutput() and getoutput() have been moved to the
subprocess module.
The commands module defines the following functions:
- 
commands.getstatusoutput(cmd)¶
- Execute the string cmd in a shell with - os.popen()and return a 2-tuple- (status, output). cmd is actually run as- { cmd ; } 2>&1, so that the returned output will contain output or error messages. A trailing newline is stripped from the output. The exit status for the command can be interpreted according to the rules for the C function- wait().
- 
commands.getoutput(cmd)¶
- Like - getstatusoutput(), except the exit status is ignored and the return value is a string containing the command’s output.
- 
commands.getstatus(file)¶
- Return the output of - ls -ld fileas a string. This function uses the- getoutput()function, and properly escapes backslashes and dollar signs in the argument.- Deprecated since version 2.6: This function is nonobvious and useless. The name is also misleading in the presence of - getstatusoutput().
Example:
>>> import commands
>>> commands.getstatusoutput('ls /bin/ls')
(0, '/bin/ls')
>>> commands.getstatusoutput('cat /bin/junk')
(256, 'cat: /bin/junk: No such file or directory')
>>> commands.getstatusoutput('/bin/junk')
(256, 'sh: /bin/junk: not found')
>>> commands.getoutput('ls /bin/ls')
'/bin/ls'
>>> commands.getstatus('/bin/ls')
'-rwxr-xr-x  1 root        13352 Oct 14  1994 /bin/ls'
See also
- Module subprocess
- Module for spawning and managing subprocesses.
