Problem with subprocess.call and cp

[Torsten Bronger]

Hallöchen!

The following code

from subprocess import call
call(['cp', 'subdir/*.jpg', 'othersubdir/'])

yields

cp: call of stat for "subdir/*.jpg" not possible: File or directory not found

(This may not be the real error message since it's back-translated
from German.) I could use shell=True, however, what's going wrong
here?

Tschö,
Torsten.

 

[Fredrik Lundh]

The following code

from subprocess import call
call(['cp', 'subdir/*.jpg', 'othersubdir/'])

yields

cp: call of stat for "subdir/*.jpg" not possible: File or directory not found

(This may not be the real error message since it's back-translated
from German.) I could use shell=True, however, what's going wrong
here?

under Unix, it's the shell that expands glob patterns. individual commands
usually don't know anything about such patterns.

so if you run the "cp" command directly, it will look for a single file named
"subdir/*.jpg". if you run it via the shell, it will get a list of matching files
from the shell.

here's a corresponding pure-python solution, btw:

import glob, shutil
for file in glob.glob("subdir/*.jpg"):
shutil.copy(file, "othersubdir")

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