Python 3 - Second Edition

29.2    Starting Subprocesses: subprocess

In the previous section, you learned about the os.system and os.popen functions, which allow you to run an external program from within a Python program. Technically speaking, this is referred to as starting a subprocess. In this section, we’ll look at the subprocess module of the standard library, which provides a comprehensive interface for starting subprocesses and communicating with them.

To run the examples in this section, you must first import the subprocess module:

>>> import subprocess  

The module essentially provides the subprocess.run function, which offers a universal interface for starting subprocesses in various configurations.

In the following sections, we’ll provide an overview of typical ...