A summary of the ways to call external programs

Here's a summary of the ways to call external programs and the advantages and disadvantages of each:

1. os.system("some_command with args") passes the command and arguments to your system's shell. This is nice because you can actually run multiple commands at once in this manner and set up pipes and input/output redirection. For example,
   os.system("some_command < input_file | another_command > output_file")
   However, while this is convenient, you have to manually handle the escaping of shell characters such as spaces, etc. On the other hand, this also lets you run commands which are simply shell commands and not actually external programs.
   http://docs.python.org/lib/os-process.html

2. stream = os.popen("some_command with args") will do the same thing as os.system except that it gives you a file-like object that you can use to access standard input/output for that process. There are 3 other variants of popen that all handle the i/o slightly differently. If you pass everything as a string, then your command is passed to the shell; if you pass them as a list then you don't need to worry about escaping anything.
   http://docs.python.org/lib/os-newstreams.html

3. The Popen class of the subprocess module. This is intended as a replacement for os.popen but has the downside of being slightly more complicated by virtue of being so comprehensive. For example, you'd say
   print Popen("echo Hello World", stdout=PIPE, shell=True).stdout.read()
   instead of
   print os.popen("echo Hello World").read()
   but it is nice to have all of the options there in one unified class instead of 4 different popen functions.
   http://docs.python.org/lib/node528.html

4. The call function from the subprocess module. This is basically just like the Popen class and takes all of the same arguments, but it simply wait until the command completes and gives you the return code. For example:
   return_code = call("echo Hello World", shell=True)
   http://docs.python.org/lib/node529.html

5. The os module also has all of the fork/exec/spawn functions that you'd have in a C program, but I don't recommend using them directly.

   
   

   Examples：

   import subprocess
   
   p = subprocess.Popen('ls', shell=True, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.STDOUT)
   for line in p.stdout.readlines():
       print line,
   retval = p.wait()
   

   You are free to do what you want with the stdout data in the pipe. In fact, you can simply omit those parameters (stdout= and stderr=) and it'll behave like os.system().

   Refer to: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/89228/calling-an-external-command-in-python
6. pexpect:    Pexpect is a pure Python module that makes Python a better tool for controlling and automating other programs. Pexpect is similar to the Don Libes `Expect` system, but Pexpect as a different interface that is easier to understand. Pexpect is basically a pattern matching system. It runs programs and watches output. When output matches a given pattern Pexpect can respond as if a human were typing responses. Pexpect can be used for automation, testing, and screen scraping. Pexpect can be used for automating interactive console applications such as ssh, ftp, passwd, telnet, etc. It can also be used to control web applications via `lynx`, `w3m`, or some other text-based web browser. Pexpect is pure Python. Unlike other Expect-like modules for Python Pexpect does not require TCL or Expect nor does it require C extensions to be compiled. It should work on any platform that supports the standard Python pty module.