May 2018
Beginner to intermediate
452 pages
11h 26m
English
The subprocess module provides tools to launch and manage other programs and commands from within your Python application. For programmers already familiar with their operating system's command-line interface, it often provides a fast and convenient way to accomplish filesystem operations or other administrative tasks. It's also highly effective at sabotaging cross-platform compatibility.
For example, you might be tempted to copy files as follows:
import subprocess subprocess.call(['cp', 'file1.txt', 'file2.txt'])
This would work on Unix-like operating systems, but fail on Windows as cp is not a valid Windows shell command. The better option in this case is to use the shutil library, which contains high-level ...