Question

Running on Windows, the following Python program produces the above output (the content of the output variable)

import commands

cmd = "dir"
(output) = commands.getoutput(cmd)
print output

Very interesting and frustrating. Can someone point me to the explanation please?

Answer 1

See the documentation:

cmd is actually run as { cmd ; } 2>&1

Which is where the { are coming from. You should use subprocess instead.

import subprocess
p = subprocess.Popen(['dir'],stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE, shell=True)
stdout,stderr = p.communicate()

The shell=True is required in this specific case as dir is an internal DOS command. Normally one should provide full path to the executable and keep shell disabled.