Question

I am trying to call the following curl command with python:

curl -k -F file=@something.zip -F "data={\\"title\\":\\"Another App\\"}" -Lu usr:pwd https://build.phonegap.com/api/v0/apps

For it to work, I’ve found that the json I’m passing in data needs to be escaped with backslashes.

I can call this command with…

os.system(curl -k -F file=@something.zip -F "data={\\"title\\":\\"Another App\\"}" -Lu usr:pwd https://build.phonegap.com/api/v0/apps)

and it works.

However, when I try to use the subprocess module like this…

s = 'curl -k -F file=@something.zip -F "data={\\"title\\":\\"Another App\\"}" -Lu usr:pwd https://build.phonegap.com/api/v0/apps'
push = subprocess.Popen(s.split(), stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE)
output, errors = push.communicate()
print output

…the curl doesn’t work and I get an error from the api I’m using that I’m using invalid parameters, which I’ve gotten in the past when I’ve used improperly escaped json.

What is going on here? Why can I call this command with os.system and not subprocess.Popen? So far my hypothesis is that the split is messing up something in the string, but I didn’t find anything that looked wrong when I check the output of s.split().

Answer 1

perhaps using shell=True

push = subprocess.Popen(s, shell=True, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE)