Question

I am writing a Python program that needs to return the active hosts scanned in one of my vulnerability scans. I have used this method before returning XML, but when I try to tack on these extra programs such as cut and grep I run into issues. Perhaps it doesn’t like “pipes” | or maybe I am doing something completely wrong here with my commas but I have tried all sorts of things and cant seems to get it to return the result like it does when I run the command standalone from the command line. Thanks very much for any help that is provided.

def activeHostsQuery():
    args = ['curl', '-s', '-k', '-H', 'X-Requested-With: curl demoapp', '-u','username:password', 'https://qualysapi.qualys.com/api/2.0/fo/scan/?action=fetch&scan_ref=scan/1111111.22222&mode=brief&output_format=csv', '|', 'cut', '-d', '-f1', '|', 'sort', '|', 'uniq', '|', 'grep', '-E', '"\"[[:digit:]]{1,3}\.[[:digit:]]{1,3}\.[[:digit:]]{1,3}\.[[:digit:]]{1,3}\""', '|', 'wc', '-l']

    activeHostsNumber = subprocess.Popen(args, stdout=subprocess.PIPE).communicate()[0]
    return activeHostsNumber

Answer 1

I would try this:

def activeHostsQuery():
    args = ['curl', '-s', '-k', '-H', 'X-Requested-With: curl demoapp', '-u','username:password', 'https://qualysapi.qualys.com/api/2.0/fo/scan/?action=fetch&scan_ref=scan/1111111.22222&mode=brief&output_format=csv', '|', 'cut', '-d', '-f1', '|', 'sort', '|', 'uniq', '|', 'grep', '-E', '"\"[[:digit:]]{1,3}\.[[:digit:]]{1,3}\.[[:digit:]]{1,3}\.[[:digit:]]{1,3}\""', '|', 'wc', '-l']

    activeHostsNumber = subprocess.Popen(" ".join("'%s'" % a for a in args), shell=True, stdout=subprocess.PIPE).communicate()[0]
    return activeHostsNumber

Edit: added quotes around arguments.

Another edit: Ok, try making the command a single string:

def activeHostsQuery():
    cmd = 'curl -s -k -H \'X-Requested-With: curl demoapp\' -u username:password \'https://qualysapi.qualys.com/api/2.0/fo/scan/?action=fetch&scan_ref=scan/1111111.22222&mode=brief&output_format=csv\' | cut -d, -f1 | sort | uniq | grep -E \'"[[:digit:]]{1,3}\\.[[:digit:]]{1,3}\\.[[:digit:]]{1,3}\\.[[:digit:]]{1,3}"\' | wc -l'

    ctiveHostsNumber = subprocess.Popen(cmd, shell = True, stdout = subprocess.PIPE).communicate()[0]
    return activeHostsNumber