CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonsafarioperating-system
user3412656
user3412656

Reputation:

How to make a python program open itself as text in safari?

I was trying to make a program in Python that would use os.system to open a file in Safari. In this case, I was trying to have it open a text copy of itself. The files name is foo.py.

import os, socket
os.system("python -m SimpleHTTPServer 4000")
IP = socket.gethostbyname(socket.gethostname())
osCommand = "open -a safari http://"+IP+":4000/foo.py"
os.system(osCommand)

Upvotes: 0

Views: 612

Answers (1)

abarnert
abarnert

Reputation: 365717

system runs a program, then waits for it to finish, before returning.

So it won't get to the next line of your code until the server has finished serving. Which will never happen. (Well, you can hit ^C, and then it will stop serving—but then when you get to the next line that opens safari, it'll have no server to connect to anymore.)

This is one of the many reasons the docs for system basically tell you not to use it:

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.

For example:

import subprocess, socket
server = subprocess.Popen(['python', '-m', 'SimpleHTTPServer', '4000'])
IP = socket.gethostbyname(socket.gethostname())
safari = subprocess.Popen(['open', '-a', 'safari', 'http://'+IP+':4000/foo.py'])
server.wait()
safari.wait()

That will start both programs in the background, and then wait for both to finish, instead of starting one, waiting for it to finish, starting the other, and waiting for it to finish.

All that being said, this is kind of a silly way to do what you want. What's wrong with just opening a file URL (like 'file:///{}'.format(os.path.abspath(sys.argv[0]))) in Safari? Or in the default web browser (which would presumably be Safari for you, but would also work on other platform, and for Mac users who used Chrome or Firefox, and so on) by using webbrowser.open on that URL?

Upvotes: 2

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