Question

I’m trying to run a program from python and print the output based on its exit status. The code below is outputting directly to my vim screen (messing it) instead of opening a shell with the output.

python << EOF
import subprocess
import vim

cmd = "BAD_COMMAND"
p = subprocess.Popen(cmd, shell=True)
retcode = p.poll()
if retcode > 0:
    output_of_error = p.communicate()[0]
    vim.command("!echo show errors here")

EOF

Answer 1

You want to redirect your subprocess to a pipe:

p = subprocess.Popen(cmd, shell=True, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE)

communicate() will then return a 2-tuple containing the contents of stdout and stderr of the process.