Execute Linux commands in Python

For last few days, I am doing an interesting project, for which I require to execute some Linux commands from Python. So I searched a bit for it and found an way to do it. For example if I want to run the command 'ls -lt', I can use the following code:

import os
os.system('ls -lt')

But problem is I want to store the result in a list. Then I thought of writing the output to a file and read the file into a list. My code was:

import os
os.system('ls -lt > output.txt')



Can you suggest a better way?

Comments

Ivan Illarionov said…
from subprocess import Popen, PIPE
s = Popen(['ls', '-lf'], stdout=PIPE).stdout.read().split()
February 22, 2008 at 2:23 AM
王同 said…
Yeah, you can do with os.popen too.

file=open("yourfile.txt","w")
for i in os.popen("ls -l"):
file.write(i)
file.close()
February 24, 2008 at 10:23 AM
Julian_Belfort said…
Hey thanks for the info! just what i needed
July 10, 2009 at 1:32 AM
Felipe said…
import commands
out = commands.getoutput("ls")
print out
July 23, 2009 at 1:54 AM
Venkat said…
import commands
out = commands.getoutput("ls")
print out

is really handy in my case, thanks for info!
September 25, 2009 at 8:49 AM
Pradeepa(pradeep) said…
Thanks to Subeen and those who wrote very useful comments.
October 15, 2009 at 4:31 PM
Anatoliy said…
This one commands help me.
lsresult = commands.getoutput('ls *.tif')
array = lsresult.split()

After that I have all *.tif files in array
March 8, 2011 at 2:03 AM
Unknown said…
This is just what I NEED! Thank you so much, dude!!
August 27, 2012 at 7:46 AM
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