What is the difference between subprocess.popen and subprocess.run

Question

I’m new to the subprocess module and the documentation leaves me wondering what the difference is between subprocess.popen and subprocess.run. Is there a difference in what the command does? Is one just newer? Which is better to use?

Asked By: jath03

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Answer 1

subprocess.run() was added in Python 3.5 as a simplification over subprocess.Popen when you just want to execute a command and wait until it finishes, but you don’t want to do anything else in the mean time. For other cases, you still need to use subprocess.Popen.

The main difference is that subprocess.run() executes a command and waits for it to finish, while with subprocess.Popen you can continue doing your stuff while the process finishes and then just repeatedly call Popen.communicate() yourself to pass and receive data to your process. Secondly, subprocess.run() returns subprocess.CompletedProcess.

subprocess.run() just wraps Popen and Popen.communicate() so you don’t need to make a loop to pass/receive data or wait for the process to finish.

Check the official documentation for info on which params subprocess.run() pass to Popen and communicate().

Answered By: Daniel

Answer 2

Both available in Python by default.

The recommended approach to invoking subprocesses is to use the run() function for all use cases it can handle. For more advanced use cases, the underlying Popen interface can be used directly.

-Subprocess.run:

import subprocess
import sys

result = subprocess.run([sys.executable, "-c", "print('ocean')"])

-Subprocess.popen: run multiple command line with subprocess, communicate method waits for the process to finish and finally prints the stdout and stderr as a tuple

EX:

import subprocess
process = subprocess.Popen(shell_cmd,
                     stdout = subprocess.PIPE, 
                     stderr = subprocess.PIPE,
                     text = True,
                     shell = True
                     )
std_out, std_err = process.communicate()
std_out.strip(), std_err

Answered By: Software Tester at ExpandCart

What is the difference between subprocess.popen and subprocess.run

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