Question

I’d like to use os.system('md5sum myFile') and have the result returned from os.system instead of just runned in a subshell where it’s echoed.

In short I’d like to do this:

resultMD5 = os.system('md5sum myFile') 

And only have the md5sum in resultMD5 and not echoed.

Answer 1

subprocess is better than using os.system or os.popen

import subprocess resultMD5 = subprocess.Popen(['md5sum','myFile'],stdout=subprocess.PIPE).communicate()[0] 

Or just calculate the md5sum yourself with the hashlib module.

import hashlib resultMD5 = hashlib.md5(open('myFile').read()).hexdigest()