Running windows shell commands with python

You would use the os module system method.

You just put in the string form of the command, the return value is the windows enrivonment variable COMSPEC

For example:

os.system('python') opens up the windows command prompt and runs the python interpreter

The newer subprocess.check_output and similar commands are supposed to replace os.system. See this page for details. While I can't test this on Windows (because I don't have access to any Windows machines), the following should work:

from subprocess import check_output
check_output("dir C:", shell=True)

check_output returns a string of the output from your command. Alternatively, subprocess.call just runs the command and returns the status of the command (usually 0 if everything is okay).

Also note that, in python 3, that string output is now bytes output. If you want to change this into a string, you need something like

from subprocess import check_output
check_output("dir C:", shell=True).decode()

If necessary, you can tell it the kind of encoding your program outputs. The default is utf-8, which typically works fine, but other standard options are here.

Also note that @bluescorpion says in the comments that Windows 10 needs a trailing backslash, as in check_output("dir C:\\", shell=True). The double backslash is needed because \ is a special character in python, so it has to be escaped. (Also note that even prefixing the string with r doesn't help if \ is the very last character of the string — r"dir C:\" is a syntax error, though r"dir C:\ " is not.)

Refactoring of @srini-beerge's answer which gets the output and the return code

import subprocess
def run_win_cmd(cmd):
    result = []
    process = subprocess.Popen(cmd,
                               shell=True,
                               stdout=subprocess.PIPE,
                               stderr=subprocess.PIPE)
    for line in process.stdout:
        result.append(line)
    errcode = process.returncode
    for line in result:
        print(line)
    if errcode is not None:
        raise Exception('cmd %s failed, see above for details', cmd)