Is subprocess.Popen completely broken?

[Skip Montanaro]

I am trying to replace os.system calls with subprocess.Popen. This simple
example fails miserably:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "/home/titan/skipm/local/lib/python2.5/subprocess.py", line 594, in __init__
errread, errwrite)
File "/home/titan/skipm/local/lib/python2.5/subprocess.py", line 1091, in
_execute_child
raise child_exception
OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory

I also tried explicitly referencing /usr/bin/ls. Same result. What gives?
I see this behavior in both Python 2.4 and 2.5 on Solaris 10 and with
2.6alpha on Mac OS X.

Frustrated in Chicago...

Skip

 

[Jeffrey Froman]

I am trying to replace os.system calls with subprocess.Popen.  This simple
example fails miserably:

Popen expects a list of program arguments. When passed a single string
instead of a list, as in your example, it assumes that the string is the
command, and looks for an executable named "ls /tmp", which of course does
not exist.

Split your command into a list of separate parameters, with the executable
as the first parameter, and it will work:

subprocess.Popen(['ls', '/tmp'])

(ls output here)

Jeffrey

 

[Istvan Albert]

Is subprocess.Popen completely broken?

Your lack of faith in Python is somewhat disturbing ...

 

[Martin Blume]

Your lack of faith in Python is somewhat
disturbing ...

I have consistently made the experience that when
I was about to ask "is X completely broken", the
error was on my side.

Martin