Python Programming On Win32

Portable Process Control: The os Module

Python itself defines a few process-manipulation functions that are portable across all platforms, including Windows. As they are portable to Unix and other operating systems, they operate at a high level and don’t cover the range of functionality provided natively. The Python os module provides a number of techniques for starting new processes.

os.system

os.system provides the most rudimentary support for new processes. It takes a single argument (the command line of the process to execute) and returns an integer “error code.” For example:

>>> import os
>>> os.system("notepad.exe C:\\autoexec.bat")
0
>>>

starts an instance of notepad, editing your autoexec.bat file. The exit code from the program is zero. Unfortunately, the result of zero is often misleading; the Windows command processor responsible for executing these commands usually refuses to pass the actual error code on, always reporting a success code of zero.

The single parameter can be anything that typically works from a Windows command prompt. Thus, the system path is searched for the program.

There are, however, a number of other limitations to this approach. First, if you execute this code from PythonWin (or any other GUI Python environment) you will notice that an empty command prompt opens. Windows knows you are running from a GUI, but isn’t smart enough to look at the program to execute to determine if it too is a GUI program; so it creates a new console for the program. This ...