python - link several Popen commands with pipes

Question

I know how to run a command using cmd = subprocess.Popen and then subprocess.communicate. Most of the time I use a string tokenized with shlex.split as 'argv' argument for Popen. Example with "ls -l":

import subprocess
import shlex
print subprocess.Popen(shlex.split(r'ls -l'), stdin = subprocess.PIPE, stdout = subprocess.PIPE, stderr = subprocess.PIPE).communicate()[0]

However, pipes seem not to work... For instance, the following example returns noting:

import subprocess
import shlex
print subprocess.Popen(shlex.split(r'ls -l | sed "s/a/b/g"'), stdin = subprocess.PIPE, stdout = subprocess.PIPE, stderr = subprocess.PIPE).communicate()[0]

Can you tell me what I am doing wrong please?

Thx

Answer 1

I think you want to instantiate two separate Popen objects here, one for 'ls' and the other for 'sed'. You'll want to pass the first Popen object's stdout attribute as the stdin argument to the 2nd Popen object.

Example:

p1 = subprocess.Popen('ls ...', stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
p2 = subprocess.Popen('sed ...', stdin=p1.stdout, stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
print p2.communicate()

You can keep chaining this way if you have more commands:

p3 = subprocess.Popen('prog', stdin=p2.stdout, ...)

See the subprocess documentation for more info on how to work with subprocesses.

Answer 2

I've made a little function to help with the piping, hope it helps. It will chain Popens as needed.

from subprocess import Popen, PIPE
import shlex

def run(cmd):
  """Runs the given command locally and returns the output, err and exit_code."""
  if "|" in cmd:    
    cmd_parts = cmd.split('|')
  else:
    cmd_parts = []
    cmd_parts.append(cmd)
  i = 0
  p = {}
  for cmd_part in cmd_parts:
    cmd_part = cmd_part.strip()
    if i == 0:
      p[i]=Popen(shlex.split(cmd_part),stdin=None, stdout=PIPE, stderr=PIPE)
    else:
      p[i]=Popen(shlex.split(cmd_part),stdin=p[i-1].stdout, stdout=PIPE, stderr=PIPE)
    i = i +1
  (output, err) = p[i-1].communicate()
  exit_code = p[0].wait()

  return str(output), str(err), exit_code

output, err, exit_code = run("ls -lha /var/log | grep syslog | grep gz")

if exit_code != 0:
  print "Output:"
  print output
  print "Error:"
  print err
  # Handle error here
else:
  # Be happy :D
  print output

Answer 3

"""
Why don't you use shell

"""

def output_shell(line):

    try:
        shell_command = Popen(line, stdout=PIPE, stderr=PIPE, shell=True)
    except OSError:
        return None
    except ValueError:
        return None

    (output, err) = shell_command.communicate()
    shell_command.wait()
    if shell_command.returncode != 0:
        print "Shell command failed to execute"
        return None
    return str(output)

Answer 4

shlex only splits up spaces according to the shell rules, but does not deal with pipes.

It should, however, work this way:

import subprocess
import shlex

sp_ls = subprocess.Popen(shlex.split(r'ls -l'), stdin = subprocess.PIPE, stdout = subprocess.PIPE, stderr = subprocess.PIPE)
sp_sed = subprocess.Popen(shlex.split(r'sed "s/a/b/g"'), stdin = sp_ls.stdout, stdout = subprocess.PIPE, stderr = subprocess.PIPE)
sp_ls.stdin.close() # makes it similiar to /dev/null
output = sp_ls.communicate()[0] # which makes you ignore any errors.
print output

according to help(subprocess)'s

Replacing shell pipe line
-------------------------
output=`dmesg | grep hda`
==>
p1 = Popen(["dmesg"], stdout=PIPE)
p2 = Popen(["grep", "hda"], stdin=p1.stdout, stdout=PIPE)
output = p2.communicate()[0]

HTH