running multiple bash commands with subprocess

If you're only running the commands in one shot then you can just use subprocess.check_output convenience function:

def subprocess_cmd(command):
    output = subprocess.check_output(command, shell=True)
    print output

Join commands with "&&".

os.system('echo a > outputa.txt && echo b > outputb.txt')

You have to use shell=True in subprocess and no shlex.split:

import subprocess

command = "echo a; echo b"

ret = subprocess.run(command, capture_output=True, shell=True)

# before Python 3.7:
# ret = subprocess.run(command, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, shell=True)

print(ret.stdout.decode())

returns:

a
b

I just stumbled on a situation where I needed to run a bunch of lines of bash code (not separated with semicolons) from within python. In this scenario the proposed solutions do not help. One approach would be to save a file and then run it with Popen, but it wasn't possible in my situation.

What I ended up doing is something like:

commands = '''
echo "a"
echo "b"
echo "c"
echo "d"
'''

process = subprocess.Popen('/bin/bash', stdin=subprocess.PIPE, stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
out, err = process.communicate(commands)
print out

So I first create the child bash process and after I tell it what to execute. This approach removes the limitations of passing the command directly to the Popen constructor.