subprocess wildcard usage

python subprocess wildcard
Cemre picture Cemre · Apr 3, 2012 · Viewed 29.7k times · Source 
import os

import subprocess

proc = subprocess.Popen(['ls','*.bc'], stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE)

out,err = proc.communicate()

print out

This script should print all the files with .bc suffix however it returns an empty list. If I do ls *.bc manually in the command line it works. Doing ['ls','test.bc'] inside the script works as well but for some reason the star symbol doesnt work.. Any ideas ?

Answer

Niklas B. picture Niklas B. · Apr 3, 2012

You need to supply shell=True to execute the command through a shell interpreter. If you do that however, you can no longer supply a list as the first argument, because the arguments will get quoted then. Instead, specify the raw commandline as you want it to be passed to the shell:

 proc = subprocess.Popen('ls *.bc', shell=True,
                                    stdout=subprocess.PIPE,
                                    stderr=subprocess.PIPE)

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