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    Nice answer/explanation. How is this answer justifying Python's motto as described in this article ? fastcompany.com/3026446/… "Stylistically, Perl and Python have different philosophies. Perl’s best known mottos is " There’s More Than One Way to Do It". Python is designed to have one obvious way to do it" Seem like it should be the other way! In Perl I know only two ways to execute a command - using back-tick or open.
    – Jean
    Commented May 26, 2015 at 21:16
  • 29
    If using Python 3.5+, use subprocess.run(). docs.python.org/3.5/library/subprocess.html#subprocess.run
    – johnthagen
    Commented Oct 7, 2015 at 16:37
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    What one typically needs to know is what is done with the child process's STDOUT and STDERR, because if they are ignored, under some (quite common) conditions, eventually the child process will issue a system call to write to STDOUT (STDERR too?) that would exceed the output buffer provided for the process by the OS, and the OS will cause it to block until some process reads from that buffer. So, with the currently recommended ways, subprocess.run(..), what exactly does "This does not capture stdout or stderr by default." imply? What about subprocess.check_output(..) and STDERR?
    – Evgeni Sergeev
    Commented Jun 1, 2016 at 10:44
  • which of the commands you recommended block my script? i.e. if I want to run multiple commands in a for loop how do I do it without it blocking my python script? I don't care about the output of the command I just want to run lots of them.
    – Charlie Parker
    Commented Oct 24, 2017 at 19:08
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    This is arguably the wrong way around. Most people only need subprocess.run() or its older siblings subprocess.check_call() et al. For cases where these do not suffice, see subprocess.Popen(). os.popen() should perhaps not be mentioned at all, or come even after "hack your own fork/exec/spawn code".
    – tripleee
    Commented Dec 3, 2018 at 6:00