The newer subprocess.check_output
and similar commands are supposed to replace os.system
. See this page for details. While I can't test this on Windows (because I don't have access to any Windows machines), the following should work:
from subprocess import check_output
check_output("dir C:", shell=True)
check_output
returns a string of the output from your command. Alternatively, subprocess.call
just runs the command and returns the status of the command (usually 0 if everything is okay).
Also note that, in python 3, that string output is now bytes
output. If you want to change this into a string, you need something like
from subprocess import check_output
check_output("dir C:", shell=True).decode()
If necessary, you can tell it the kind of encoding your program outputs. The default is utf-8
, which typically works fine, but other standard options are here.
Also note that @bluescorpion says in the comments that Windows 10 needs a trailing backslash, as in check_output("dir C:\\", shell=True)
. The double backslash is needed because \
is a special character in python, so it has to be escaped. (Also note that even prefixing the string with r
doesn't help if \
is the very last character of the string — r"dir C:\"
is a syntax error, though r"dir C:\ "
is not.)