python getoutput() equivalent in subprocess

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I want to get the output from some shell commands like ls or df in a python script. I see that commands.getoutput('ls') is deprecated but subprocess.call('ls') will only get me the return code.

I'll hope there is some simple solution.

subprocess command shell python
3 Answers

To catch errors with subprocess.check_output(), you can use CalledProcessError. If you want to use the output as string, decode it from the bytecode.

# \return String of the output, stripped from whitespace at right side; or None on failure.
def runls():
    import subprocess
    try:
        byteOutput = subprocess.check_output(['ls', '-a'], timeout=2)
        return byteOutput.decode('UTF-8').rstrip()
    except subprocess.CalledProcessError as e:
        print("Error in ls -a:\n", e.output)
        return None
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