Question

I’m building a web application that will is going to manipulate (pad, mix, merge etc) sound files and I’ve found that sox does exactly what I want. Sox is a linux command line program and I’m feeling a little uncomfortable with having the python web app starting new sox processes on my server on a per request basis.

Example:

import os os.system('sox input.wav -b 24 output.aiff rate -v -L -b 90 48k') 

This whole setup seems a little unstable to me.

So my question is, what’s the best practice for running command line programs from within a python (or any scripting language) web app?

Message queues would be one thing to implement in order to get around the whole request response cycle. But is there other ways to make these things more elegant?

Answer 1

The subprocess module is the preferred way of running other programs from Python — much more flexible and nicer to use than os.system.

import subprocess #subprocess.check_output(['ls', '-l'])  # All that is technically needed... print(subprocess.check_output(['ls', '-l']))