Question

I am running mongoimport command using python commands module as

status = utilities.execute(mongoimport)

in utilities.py

def execute(command):
    if not command:
        return (-1, 'command can not be empty or null')
    return commands.getstatusoutput(command)  

When I run this, I see error as

sh: Syntax error: ";" unexpected 

I see that documentation says :

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  

How can I fix this to be able to run this command?

Answer 1

Use the subprocess module

from subprocess import check_output
output = check_output(["ls", "-l"])

This will raise an error if the command fails – no need to check for empty string. If you are really sure that you want to pass stuff through the shell then call like this

output = check_output("ls -l", shell=True)

Just note that passing stuff through the shell is an excellent vector for security problems.