I am currently working on a python script to automatically parse a large amount of emails created by a registration form. Due to constraints outside my control, the way I chose to do this is to mirror all mails through offlineimap, run a script that processes all mails and files the relevant info into the right places and then run offlineimap again to move all processed mail into a different folders. Being on Windows(7), I run offlineimap through the Cygwin Terminal.
In order to allow not-so-tech-versed colleagues use my script, I wanted to include both runs of offlineimap into the script using:
import subprocess
subprocess.run("offlineimap", shell=True, timeout=20)
I get as a result:
CompletedProcess(args='offlineimap', returncode=1)
Sadly I'm rather new to Python and the subprocess.run command appears to be so new that google didn't yield too many examples. But the problem appears to be that offlineimap is run in the Windows command shell and it fails.
So the solutions to my problem would be either:
a) utilize the cygwin terminal through python
b) run offlineimap through the windows command shell
Sadly the documentation of offlineimap only mentions Windows in passing and the tool seems to be written to be run on linux machines. So I'm not holding my breath for option b) but any advise would be appreciated.
Related
I've created a simple script that executes a "moving mouse and keyboard" sequence. Although currently to get this to work I use a Shell (Idle) to run and that is to slow with boot up time and such.
Is there a way to have this python file on desktop och with a hotkey swiftly run the code? I tried doing it through terminal but it doesn't like my module.
Some info:
This is for both mac and windows.
The module I imported is pyautogui from PyPi and it works in the shell.
Thank you in advance!
Some things to consider when trying to setup a hotkey to successfully execute any kind of command:
Each Operating System has its own ways to setup hotkeys and sometimes this may differ between distributions as well as between desktop managers.
Many of the relevant how-to-descriptions are easily found via regular search machines as Google.
If you would in fact like your script to set-up its own hotkeys you would have to re-write it in such a manner that it can detect the current operating system/distribution/desktop manager by itself and execute the commands relevant to that particular set-up.
I just learned python. I want to make a python program to setup my ubuntu linux distribution.
How to simulate to enter "apt-get install firefox" and an enter key?
When installation is sucessful, "finished!" shows on the terminal. How my python program can know key word "finished" is displayed?
The terminal is a just way for a person to issue commands to the operating system and for the operating system to show results back to the person. With Python and other languages, you can issue commands to the operation system without a terminal and programmatically process responses received back from the OS or the program you had the OS run. For python, use the subprocess module. For example, you might write something like subprocess.POpen(["apt-get", "install", "firefox"], ...). I am on Windows, so cannot test a specific example on Ubuntu. Read the docs and experiment with the examples and options.
I just set up my first aws server for a personal project I'm doing. I'm running ubuntu linux, and I have a python script that accesses an sqlite database file in order to send email. I have these same files on my own ubuntu machine and the script works fine. I'm having trouble, however, figuring out how to run my script from the terminal in my aws vm. Normally I use idle to run my python script on my linux machine, so I'm trying to figure out how to run it from the terminal and it's giving me some trouble.
I tried
python script.py
which did nothing, so I converted it to an executable, ran it, and got
./script.py: line 1: import: command not found
...and so on
I realized that I had to add
#!/usr/bin/env python3
to my script, so I did that, converted to executable again, and ran it by entering
./script.py
which also did nothing. If the program had run, it would have delivered an email to my inbox. Is there any way I can tell if it's actually trying to run my script? Or am I trying to run it incorrectly?
You can modify the script to add verbose that prints out to the console the status of the script, or if you just want to know whether your script is running in the background, you can check whether the process is active using ps (process name would be the name of the script) :
ps aux | grep "script.py"
Anyways the former is a better practice, since you can exactly know execution flow of your script.
I would like to create a simple Python program that will concurrently execute 2 independent scripts. For now, the two scripts just print a sequence of numbers but my intention is to use this program to concurrently run a few Twitter streaming programs in the future.
I suspect I need to use subprocess.Popen but I cannot quite get my head around what arguments I should put in there. There was a similar question on StackOverflow but the code provided there (pasted below) doesn't print anything. I will appreciate your help.
My files are:
thread1.py
thread2.py
import subprocess
subprocess.Popen(['screen', './thread1.py']))
subprocess.Popen(['screen', './thread2.py'])
Use supervisord
supervisord is process control system just for the purpose of running multiple command line scripts.
It features:
multiple controlled processes
autorestarting failed runs
log stdout and stderr output
starting scripts in order (using priority)
command line utility to view latest log output, stop, start, restart the processes
This solution works only on *nix based systems, it is not available on Windows.
As wanderlust mentioned, why do you want to do it this way and not via linux command line?
Otherwise, the solution you post is doing what it is meant to, i.e, you are doing this at the command line:
screen ./thread1.py
screen ./thread2.py
This will open a screen session and run the program and output within this screen session, such that you will not see the output on your terminal directly. To trouble shoot your output, just execute the scripts without the screen call:
import subprocess
subprocess.Popen(['./thread1.py'])
subprocess.Popen(['./thread2.py'])
Content of thread1.py:
#!/usr/bin/env python
def countToTen():
for i in range(10):
print i
countToTen()
Content of thread2.py:
#!/usr/bin/env python
def countToHundreds():
for i in range(10):
print i*100
countToHundreds()
Then don't forget to do this on the command line:
chmod u+x thread*.py
You can also just open several Command Prompt windows to run several Python programs at once - just run one in each of them:
In each Command Prompt window, go to the correct directory (such as C:/Python27) and then type 'python YourCodeNo1.py' in one Command Prompt window, 'python YourCodeNo2.py' in the next one ect. .
I'm currently running 3 codes at one time in this way, without slowing any of them down.
I'd like to call a separate non-child python program from a python script and have it run externally in a new shell instance. The original python script doesn't need to be aware of the instance it launches, it shouldn't block when the launched process is running and shouldn't care if it dies. This is what I have tried which returns no error but seems to do nothing...
import subprocess
python_path = '/usr/bin/python'
args = [python_path, '&']
p = subprocess.Popen(args, shell=True)
What should I be doing differently
EDIT
The reason for doing this is I have an application with a built in version of python, I have written some python tools that should be run separately alongside this application but there is no assurance that the user will have python installed on their system outside the application with the builtin version I'm using. Because of this I can get the python binary path from the built in version programatically and I'd like to launch an external version of the built in python. This eliminates the need for the user to install python themselves. So in essence I need a simple way to call an external python script using my current running version of python programatically.
I don't need to catch any output into the original program, in fact once launched I'd like it to have nothing to do with the original program
EDIT 2
So it seems that my original question was very unclear so here are more details, I think I was trying to over simplify the question:
I'm running OSX but the code should also work on windows machines.
The main application that has a built in version of CPython is a compiled c++ application that ships with a python framework that it uses at runtime. You can launch the embedded version of this version of python by doing this in a Terminal window on OSX
/my_main_app/Contents/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/bin/python
From my main application I'd like to be able to run a command in the version of python embedded in the main app that launches an external copy of a python script using the above python version just like I would if I did the following command in a Terminal window. The new launched orphan process should have its own Terminal window so the user can interact with it.
/my_main_app/Contents/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/bin/python my_python_script
I would like the child python instance not to block the main application and I'd like it to have its own terminal window so the user can interact with it. The main application doesn't need to be aware of the child once its launched in any way. The only reason I would do this is to automate launching an external application using a Terminal for the user
If you're trying to launch a new terminal window to run a new Python in (which isn't what your question asks for, but from a comment it sounds like it's what you actually want):
You can't. At least not in a general-purpose, cross-platform way.
Python is just a command-line program that runs with whatever stdin/stdout/stderr it's given. If those happen to be from a terminal, then it's running in a terminal. It doesn't know anything about the terminal beyond that.
If you need to do this for some specific platform and some specific terminal program—e.g., Terminal.app on OS X, iTerm on OS X, the "DOS prompt" on Windows, gnome-terminal on any X11 system, etc.—that's generally doable, but the way to do it is by launching or scripting the terminal program and telling it to open a new window and run Python in that window. And, needless to say, they all have completely different ways of doing that.
And even then, it's not going to be possible in all cases. For example, if you ssh in to a remote machine and run Python on that machine, there is no way it can reach back to your machine and open a new terminal window.
On most platforms that have multiple possible terminals, you can write some heuristic code that figures out which terminal you're currently running under by just walking os.getppid() until you find something that looks like a terminal you know how to deal with (and if you get to init/launchd/etc. without finding one, then you weren't running in a terminal).
The problem is that you're running Python with the argument &. Python has no idea what to do with that. It's like typing this at the shell:
/usr/bin/python '&'
In fact, if you pay attention, you're almost certainly getting something like this through your stderr:
python: can't open file '&': [Errno 2] No such file or directory
… which is exactly what you'd get from doing the equivalent at the shell.
What you presumably wanted was the equivalent of this shell command:
/usr/bin/python &
But the & there isn't an argument at all, it's part of sh syntax. The subprocess module doesn't know anything about sh syntax, and you're telling it not to use a shell, so there's nobody to interpret that &.
You could tell subprocess to use a shell, so it can do this for you:
cmdline = '{} &'.format(python_path)
p = subprocess.Popen(cmdline, shell=True)
But really, there's no good reason to. Just opening a subprocess and not calling communicate or wait on it already effectively "puts it in the background", just like & does on the shell. So:
args = [python_path]
p = subprocess.Popen(args)
This will start a new Python interpreter that sits there running in the background, trying to use the same stdin/stdout/stderr as your parent. I'm not sure why you want that, but it's the same thing that using & in the shell would have done.
Actually I think there might be a solution to your problem, I found a useful solution at another question here.
This way subprocess.popen starts a new python shell instance and runs the second script from there. It worked perfectly for me on Windows 10.
You can try using screen command
with this command a new shell instance created and the current instance runs in the background.
# screen; python script1.py
After running above command, a new shell prompt will be seen where we can run another script and script1.py will be running in the background.
Hope it helps.