Running windows shell commands with python

Question

How can we interact with OS shell using Python ? I want to run windows cmd commands via python. How can it be achieved ?

Accepted Answer

The newer `subprocess.check_output` and similar commands are supposed to replace `os.system`. See this page for details. While I can't test this on Windows (because I don't have access to any Windows machines), the following should work:

```
from subprocess import check_output
check_output("dir C:", shell=True)
```

`check_output` returns a string of the output from your command. Alternatively, `subprocess.call` just runs the command and returns the status of the command (usually 0 if everything is okay).

Also note that, in python 3, that string output is now `bytes` output. If you want to change this into a string, you need something like

```
from subprocess import check_output
check_output("dir C:", shell=True).decode()
```

If necessary, you can tell it the kind of encoding your program outputs. The default is `utf-8`, which typically works fine, but other standard options are here.

Also note that @bluescorpion says in the comments that Windows 10 needs a trailing backslash, as in `check_output("dir C:\", shell=True)`. The double backslash is needed because `\` is a special character in python, so it has to be escaped. (Also note that even prefixing the string with `r` doesn't help if `\` is the very last character of the string — `r"dir C:"` is a syntax error, though `r"dir C:\ "` is not.)

Running windows shell commands with python

Solution

Problem