Question

I am trying to untar a tar file via popen (from platform import popen) and am running into problems. The command runs if I use the interactive script, but does not if I put it in a .py file and run it.

Basically, I change to to that directory and run popen("tar xvf the_tar.tar")

Why would these be different? How come it does not run in the script? Identical code between the interactive session and the script!

Edit:

The exact script is as follows

import os, time
from platform import popen

os.chdir("C:/testing/")
popen("tar -xvf the_tar.tar")

Answer 1

You should use the tarfile library:

from tarfile import TarFile

tar = TarFile("the_tar.tar")
tar.extractall()