How to make a call to an executable from Python script?

Question

I need to execute this script from my Python script.

Is it possible? The script generate some outputs with some files being written. How do I access these files? I have tried with subprocess call function but without success.

fx@fx-ubuntu:~/Documents/projects/foo$ bin/bar -c somefile.xml -d text.txt -r aString -f anotherString >output

The application "bar" also references to some libraries, it also create the file "bar.xml" besides the output. How do I get access to these files? Just by using open()?

Thank you,

Edit:

The error from Python runtime is only this line.

$ python foo.py
bin/bar: bin/bar: cannot execute binary file

Answer 1

For executing the external program, do this:

import subprocess
args = ("bin/bar", "-c", "somefile.xml", "-d", "text.txt", "-r", "aString", "-f", "anotherString")
#Or just:
#args = "bin/bar -c somefile.xml -d text.txt -r aString -f anotherString".split()
popen = subprocess.Popen(args, stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
popen.wait()
output = popen.stdout.read()
print output

And yes, assuming your bin/bar program wrote some other assorted files to disk, you can open them as normal with open("path/to/output/file.txt"). Note that you don't need to rely on a subshell to redirect the output to a file on disk named "output" if you don't want to. I'm showing here how to directly read the output into your python program without going to disk in between.