I learned about a module called shlex. It's stated to be a simple lexical analyzer, and I don't really know what this means, but I found at least one of its uses. It provides a convenience method that lets me split a command line string, to feed into subprocess module.
Let's say I want to run the command /bin/cat 'file with spaces' from
within python. A normal split won't work, because it uses white
space as a delimiter (by default). To test, I will create a file named
"file with spaces" and add text (content of 'file with spaces').
$ echo 'content of file with spaces' > 'file with spaces'
And here's the code, using the normal split method:
import subprocess
cmd = "/bin/cat 'file with spaces'"
formatted_cmd = cmd.split()
subprocess.Popen(formatted_cmd)
Output:
/bin/cat: 'file: No such file or directory
/bin/cat: with: No such file or directory
/bin/cat: spaces': No such file or directory
That's when shlex module gets to be useful.
import shlex, subprocess
cmd = "/bin/cat 'file with spaces'"
formatted_cmd = shlex.split(cmd)
subprocess.Popen(formatted_cmd)
Output:
content of 'file with spaces'