Taking The Results Of A Bash Command And Using It In Python

I am trying to write a code in python that will take some information from top and put it into a file. I want to just write the name of the application and generate the file. The p

Solution 1:

First up, the use of input() is discouraged as it expects the user to type in valid Python expressions. Use raw_input() instead:

app = raw_input('Name of the application: ')

Next up, the return value from system('pidof') isn't the PID, it's the exit code from the pidof command, i.e. zero on success, non-zero on failure. You want to capture the output of pidof.

import subprocess

# Python 2.7 only
pid = int(subprocess.check_output(['pidof', app]))

# Python 2.4+
pid = int(subprocess.Popen(['pidof', app], stdout=subprocess.PIPE).communicate()[0])

# Older (deprecated)
pid = int(os.popen('pidof ' + app).read())

The next line is missing a space after the grep and would have resulted in a command like grep1234. Using the string formatting operator % will make this a little easier to spot:

os.system('top -d 30 | grep %d > test.txt' % (pid))

The third line is badly quoted and should have caused a syntax error. Watch out for the single quotes inside of single quotes.

os.system("awk '{print $10, $11}' test.txt > test2.txt")

Solution 2:

Instead of os.system, I recommend you to use the subprocess module: http://docs.python.org/library/subprocess.html#module-subprocess

With that module, you can communicate (input and output) with a shell. The documentation explains the details of how to use it.

Hope this helps!