Question

I have a Windows console application that returns some text. I want to read that text in a Python script. I have tried reading it by using os.system, but it is not working properly.

import os
foo = os.system('test.exe')

Assuming that test.exe returns “bar”, I want the variable foo to be set to “bar”. But what happens is, it prints “bar” on the console and the variable foo is set to 0.

What do I need to do to get the behavior I want?

Answer 1

Please use subprocess

import subprocess
foo = subprocess.Popen('test.exe',stdout=subprocess.PIPE,stderr=subprocess.PIPE)

http://docs.python.org/library/subprocess.html#module-subprocess