Question

I have a situation where there is a program which is written in c++. It is a kind of a server which you need to start first. Then from another konsole you can call the program passing commandline arguments and it does stuff. Also it provides rpc and rest based access. So you can write a rpc or rest based library to interface with the server.
So my question is, since the program can be managed using mere commandline arguments, isn’t it better to use python’s subprocess module and build a library (wrapper) around it? Or is there any problem with this method?
Consider another case. Say I wanted to build a GUI around any linux utility like grep which allows user to test regular expressions (like we have on websites). So isn’t it easier to communicate to grep using subprocess?
Thanks.

Answer 1

I think I’d prefer to use any of the rpc or rest interfaces, because the results you can obtain from them are usually in a format that is easy to parse since those interfaces have been designed for machine interaction. However, a command line interface is designed for human interaction and this means that the output is easy to parse for the human eye, but not necessarily by another program that receives the output.