Question

i’m trying to do shell command then save the output into variable using shell script. So i use backticks like this :

out=`ls -l`
print $out

that code is working fine,and i can use it for any other shell command, but when i try to do ‘python –version’ to check python version. i got weird problem. The backtick is not working for “python –version” command while it’s working fine with any other commands, it prints the output to the screen and save nothing to the variable $out. so if i do :

out =`python --version`
print "my python version is "$out

result:

Python 2.6.1
my python version is 

also i tried to use $() to replace backtick , but no luck. Any idea ?

Answer 1

You have a space before your equals sign:

out =`python --version`

Should be:

out=`python --version`

Update

Also python outputs the version string to stderr, so you need to redirect it to stdout:

out=`python --version 2>&1`