Question

In a python script I call a bash script as follows:

subprocess.Popen(["./scan.sh", dir])

Inside that script, there is,

find $1 -name "*013*.txt" > found_files.txt

For some reason, the dir argument from python is translated into a version with quotes inside the bash script. Printing ‘dir’ in python yields the exact path as the user typed it:

~/Desktop/Files

however, find fails with

find: '~/Desktop/Files' no such directory

Running scan.sh manually with ~/Desktop/Files as the argument works fine. How come quotes are being put around it…?

Answer 1

There aren’t. What’s happening is that the ~ is not being interpreted, as it’s the shell’s job to do so. Use os.path.expanduser() to expand the path before passing it to subprocess.