[python] Linux command-line call not returning what it should from os.system?

I need to make some command line calls to linux and get the return from this, however doing it as below is just returning 0 when it should return a time value, like 00:08:19, I am testing the exact same call in regular command line and it returns the time value 00:08:19 so I am confused as to what I am doing wrong as I thought this was how to do it in python.

import os
retvalue = os.system("ps -p 2993 -o time --no-headers")
print retvalue

Yes it's counter-intuitive and does not seem very pythonic, but it actually just mimics the unix API design, where these calld are C POSIX functions. Check man 3 popen && man 3 system

Somewhat more convenient snippet to replace os.system that I use:

from subprocess import (PIPE, Popen)


def invoke(command):
    '''
    Invoke command as a new system process and return its output.
    '''
    return Popen(command, stdout=PIPE, shell=True).stdout.read()


result = invoke('echo Hi, bash!')
# Result contains standard output (as you expected it in the first place).

If you're only interested in the output from the process, it's easiest to use subprocess' check_output function:

output = subprocess.check_output(["command", "arg1", "arg2"]);

Then output holds the program output to stdout. Check the link above for more info.

For your requirement, Popen function of subprocess python module is the answer. For example,

import subprocess
..
process = subprocess.Popen("ps -p 2993 -o time --no-headers", stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE)
stdout, stderr = process.communicate()
print stdout

Your code returns 0 if the execution of the commands passed is successful and non zero if it fails. The following program works on python2.7, haven checked 3 and versions above. Try this code.

>>> import commands
>>> ret = commands.getoutput("ps -p 2993 -o time --no-headers")
>>> print ret

using commands module
import commands
""" 
Get high load process details 
"""
result = commands.getoutput("ps aux | sort -nrk 3,3 | head -n 1")
print result  -- python 2x
print (result) -- python 3x 

okey I believe the fastest way it would be

import os
print(os.popen('command').readline())
x = _
print(x)

The simplest way is like this:

import os
retvalue = os.popen("ps -p 2993 -o time --no-headers").readlines()
print retvalue

This will be returned as a list

This is an old thread, but purely using os.system, the following's a valid way of accessing the data returned by the ps call. Note: it does use a pipe to write the data to a file on disk. And OP didn't specifically ask for a solution using os.system.

>>> os.system("ps > ~/Documents/ps.txt")
0    #system call is processed.
>>> os.system("cat ~/Documents/ps.txt")
  PID TTY          TIME CMD
 9927 pts/0    00:00:00 bash
10063 pts/0    00:00:00 python
12654 pts/0    00:00:00 sh
12655 pts/0    00:00:00 ps
0

accordingly,

>>> os.system("ps -p 10063 -o time --no-headers > ~/Documents/ps.txt")
0
>>> os.system("cat ~/Documents/ps.txt")
00:00:00
0

No idea why they are all returning zeroes though.

I can not add a comment to IonicBurger because I do not have "50 reputation" so I will add a new entry. My apologies. os.popen() is the best for multiple/complicated commands (my opinion) and also for getting the return value in addition to getting stdout like the following more complicated multiple commands:

import os
out = [ i.strip() for i in os.popen(r"ls *.py | grep -i '.*file' 2>/dev/null; echo $? ").readlines()]
print "     stdout: ", out[:-1]
print "returnValue: ", out[-1]

This will list all python files that have the word 'file' anywhere in their name. The [...] is a list comprehension to remove (strip) the newline character from each entry. The echo $? is a shell command to show the return status of the last command executed which will be the grep command and the last item of the list in this example. the 2>/dev/null says to print the stderr of the grep command to /dev/null so it does not show up in the output. The 'r' before the 'ls' command is to use the raw string so the shell will not interpret metacharacters like '*' incorrectly. This works in python 2.7. Here is the sample output:

      stdout:  ['fileFilter.py', 'fileProcess.py', 'file_access..py', 'myfile.py']
 returnValue:  0