Linux command-line call not returning what it should from os.system?

If you’re only interested in the output from the process, it’s easiest to use subprocess’ check_output function:

output = subprocess.check_output(["command", "arg1", "arg2"]);

Then output holds the program output to stdout. Check the link above for more info.

okey I believe the fastest way it would be

import os
print(os.popen('command').readline())
x = _
print(x)

Your code returns 0 if the execution of the commands passed is successful and non zero if it fails. The following program works on python2.7, haven checked 3 and versions above. Try this code.

>>> import commands
>>> ret = commands.getoutput("ps -p 2993 -o time --no-headers")
>>> print ret

Yes it’s counter-intuitive and does not seem very pythonic, but it actually just mimics the unix API design, where these calld are C POSIX functions. Check man 3 popen && man 3 system

Somewhat more convenient snippet to replace os.system that I use:

from subprocess import (PIPE, Popen)


def invoke(command):
    '''
    Invoke command as a new system process and return its output.
    '''
    return Popen(command, stdout=PIPE, shell=True).stdout.read()


result = invoke('echo Hi, bash!')
# Result contains standard output (as you expected it in the first place).

The simplest way is like this:

import os
retvalue = os.popen("ps -p 2993 -o time --no-headers").readlines()
print retvalue

This will be returned as a list

This is an old thread, but purely using os.system, the following’s a valid way of accessing the data returned by the ps call. Note: it does use a pipe to write the data to a file on disk. And OP didn’t specifically ask for a solution using os.system.

>>> os.system("ps > ~/Documents/ps.txt")
0    #system call is processed.
>>> os.system("cat ~/Documents/ps.txt")
  PID TTY          TIME CMD
 9927 pts/0    00:00:00 bash
10063 pts/0    00:00:00 python
12654 pts/0    00:00:00 sh
12655 pts/0    00:00:00 ps
0

accordingly,

>>> os.system("ps -p 10063 -o time --no-headers > ~/Documents/ps.txt")
0
>>> os.system("cat ~/Documents/ps.txt")
00:00:00
0

No idea why they are all returning zeroes though.

For your requirement, Popen function of subprocess python module is the answer. For example,

import subprocess
..
process = subprocess.Popen("ps -p 2993 -o time --no-headers", stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE)
stdout, stderr = process.communicate()
print stdout

I can not add a comment to IonicBurger because I do not have “50 reputation” so
I will add a new entry. My apologies. os.popen() is the best for multiple/complicated commands (my opinion) and also for getting the return value in addition to getting stdout like the following more complicated multiple commands:

import os
out = [ i.strip() for i in os.popen(r"ls *.py | grep -i '.*file' 2>/dev/null; echo $? ").readlines()]
print "     stdout: ", out[:-1]
print "returnValue: ", out[-1]

This will list all python files that have the word ‘file’ anywhere in their name. The […] is a list comprehension to remove (strip) the newline character from each entry. The echo $? is a shell command to show the return status of the last command executed which will be the grep command and the last item of the list in this example. the 2>/dev/null says to print the stderr of the grep command to /dev/null so it does not show up in the output. The ‘r’ before the ‘ls’ command is to use the raw string so the shell will not interpret metacharacters like ‘*’ incorrectly. This works in python 2.7. Here is the sample output:

      stdout:  ['fileFilter.py', 'fileProcess.py', 'file_access..py', 'myfile.py']
 returnValue:  0

using commands module
import commands
""" 
Get high load process details 
"""
result = commands.getoutput("ps aux | sort -nrk 3,3 | head -n 1")
print result  -- python 2x
print (result) -- python 3x