How do I run an operating system command from within a Python program (in a similar way to I would use backquotes in other languages)

There's a number of ways of running commands from within - using forks, execs, etc.

If you want to run a command and analyse its output like the backquotes do in other languages, you're really asking for two things to be done, so you'll use two functions.

popen opens a pipe to another command (varients allow you to decide whether you want to access input, output and error channels) then you can readlines (or use another file read function) to go through the output.

Here's an example that runs a du command ... clearly it will only work on operating systems that support the command.  popen4 allows us to handle both stdout and stderr through the same input stream.

Code:

import os import re put, get = os.popen4("du -s /Users/*") for user in get.readlines():        if re.match(r'^\d',user): print user,

The regular expression handler is used to filter out only the valid data lines in this example ....

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