Python escaping sed and bash command with subprocess

0
votes

Question:

How do I use sed with python successfully? I have to run this command on a remote server to get a list of comma delimited hosts. When ran from bash I get what I want which is something like host1, host2, host3

Here is what I have:

process = subprocess.Popen(["ssh $USER@mychefserver knife search node "chef_environment:*" | grep -i "node name" | egrep -i "stuff|ruff" | uniq -u | sort -n | cut -d ":" -f 2 | sed -e 's/^[ \t]*//' | tr '\n' ', '
"], shell=False, stdout=PIPE)

I know I'll have to escape the \n, \t, etc, but I'm having trouble with the rest. Whenever I try to run it from my Python script I get an error for invalid syntax even though I've tried a cornucopia of escapes.

1
pythonbashsedsubprocess

1 Answers

2
votes

You string quoting is broken as you use " inside a double quoted string. You have to escape the " like \". Further note, that most of the double quotes in command line can be replaced by single quotes '. The following code should work:

process = subprocess.Popen(["ssh $USER@mychefserver knife search node \"chef_environment:*\" | grep -i 'node name' | egrep -i 'stuff|ruff' | uniq -u | sort -n | cut -d':' -f 2 | sed -e 's/^[ \t]*//' | tr '\n' ', '"], shell=False, stdout=subprocess.PIPE)