CODEWITHSUNDEEP
python
Roy
Roy

Reputation: 867

Command line in a Python script

I'm using subprocess to call command line. For example,

subprocess.check_output(["echo", "Hello World!"])

This is for one argument. I want to call an executable called "myFuntion" and pass several arguments to it, by their names. The command line I would have written is:

./myFunction --arg1 a1 --arg2 a2

How do I "translate" this?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 39

Answers (1)

abarnert
abarnert

Reputation: 365717

Simple: each argument is a separate element in the list.

So, if you understand how the shell would separate out this command line:

./myFunction --arg1 a1 --arg2 a2

… you know what the arguments are. When there are no quotes or escapes or anything else fancy, the shell just separates on spaces. So this is just 5 arguments:

subprocess.check_output(["./myFunction", "--arg1", "a1", "--arg2", "a2"])

If you have a command line that you're not sure how to translate, you can ask your shell to do it for you… or just use the shlex module in Python:

>>> print(shlex.split('./myFunction --arg1 a1 --arg2 a2'))
['./myFunction', '--arg1', 'a1', '--arg2', 'a2']

Upvotes: 4

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