Question

how can I resolve a (shell) back-quoted string in python?

Say, I have the string "`cat /etc/hosts | grep hostname`", and I want to get the shell interpretation of it, e.g: “0.0.0.0 hostname\n”. How can I do that?

Answer 1

Use shlex.split():

>>> import shlex
>>> shlex.split('cat /etc/hosts | grep hostname')
['cat', '/etc/hosts', '|', 'grep', 'hostname']

If, however, you are looking for the output of the command in backticks, you’d need to use the subprocess module instead:

>>> import subprocess
>>> subprocess.check_output('cat /etc/hosts | grep dahn', shell=True)
'127.0.0.1\tdahnlocal.internal.int\n'

Note that I set shell to True to have the shell interpret it for me.