How to execute a program or call a system command?

Use the subprocess module in the standard library:

import subprocess
subprocess.run(["ls", "-l"])

The advantage of subprocess.run over os.system is that it is more flexible (you can get the stdout, stderr, the "real" status code, better error handling, etc...).

Even the documentation for os.system recommends using subprocess instead:

The subprocess module provides more powerful facilities for spawning new processes and retrieving their results; using that module is preferable to using this function. See the Replacing Older Functions with the subprocess Module section in the subprocess documentation for some helpful recipes.

On Python 3.4 and earlier, use subprocess.call instead of .run:

subprocess.call(["ls", "-l"])

I'd recommend using the subprocess module instead of os.system because it does shell escaping for you and is therefore much safer.

subprocess.call(['ping', 'localhost'])

Use subprocess.call:

from subprocess import call

# Using list
call(["echo", "Hello", "world"])

# Single string argument varies across platforms so better split it
call("echo Hello world".split(" "))

However, if the command generates any output, it is sent to the interpreter standard output stream. Using this command is not recommended. In the following code, we will try to know the version of git using the system command git --version.

import os

cmd = "git --version"

returned_value = os.system(cmd)  # returns the exit code in unix
print('returned value:', returned_value)

Python subprocess.call() Function

In the previous section, we saw that os.system() function works fine. But it’s not recommended way to execute shell commands. We will use the Python subprocess module to execute system commands.

We can run shell commands by using subprocess.call() functions. See the following code which is equivalent to the previous code.

import subprocess

cmd = "git --version"

returned_value = subprocess.call(cmd, shell=True)  # returns the exit code in unix
print('returned value:', returned_value)