Python: How to get stdout after running os.system?

Question

I want to get the stdout in a variable after running the os.system call.

Lets take this line as an example:

batcmd="dir"
result = os.system(batcmd)

result will contain the error code (stderr 0 under Windows or 1 under some linux for the above example).

How can I get the stdout for the above command without using redirection in the executed command?

Answer 1

If all you need is the stdout output, then take a look at subprocess.check_output():

import subprocess

batcmd="dir"
result = subprocess.check_output(batcmd, shell=True)

Because you were using os.system(), you'd have to set shell=True to get the same behaviour. You do want to heed the security concerns about passing untrusted arguments to your shell.

If you need to capture stderr as well, simply add stderr=subprocess.STDOUT to the call:

result = subprocess.check_output([batcmd], stderr=subprocess.STDOUT)

to redirect the error output to the default output stream.

If you know that the output is text, add text=True to decode the returned bytes value with the platform default encoding; use encoding="..." instead if that codec is not correct for the data you receive.