I read this somewhere a while ago but cant seem to find it. I am trying to find a command that will execute commands in the terminal and then output the result.

For example: the script will be:

command 'ls -l'

It will out the result of running that command in the terminal

There are several ways to do this:

A simple way is using the os module:

import os
os.system("ls -l")

More complex things can be achieved with the subprocess module: for example:

import subprocess
test = subprocess.Popen(["ping","-W","2","-c", "1", "192.168.1.70"], stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
output = test.communicate()[0]

I prefer usage of subprocess module:

from subprocess import call
call(["ls", "-l"])

Reason is that if you want to pass some variable in the script this gives very easy way for example take the following part of the code

abc = a.c
call(["vim", abc])

• Custom standard input for python subprocess

In fact any question on subprocess will be a good read

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/subprocess

You should also look into commands.getstatusoutput

This returns a tuple of length 2.. The first is the return integer ( 0 – when the commands is successful ) second is the whole output as will be shown in the terminal.

For ls

    import commands
    s=commands.getstatusoutput('ls')
    print s
    >> (0, 'file_1\nfile_2\nfile_3')
    s[1].split("\n")
    >> ['file_1', 'file_2', 'file_3']

import os
os.system("echo 'hello world'")

This should work. I do not know how to print the output into the python Shell.

The os.popen() is pretty simply to use, but it has been deprecated since Python 2.6. You should use the subprocess module instead.

Read here: reading a os.popen(command) into a string

Jupyter

In a jupyter notebook you can use the magic function !

!echo "execute a command"
files = !ls -a /data/dir/ #get the output into a variable

ipython

To execute this as a .py script you would need to use ipython

files = get_ipython().getoutput('ls -a /data/dir/')

execute script

$ ipython my_script.py

You could import the ‘os’ module and use it like this :

import os
os.system('#DesiredAction')

for python3 use subprocess

import subprocess
s = subprocess.getstatusoutput(f'ps -ef | grep python3')
print(s)