The commands.getstatusoutput function does not currently work on Windows because windows doesn't like curly braces in shell commands. By checking the name of the OS using os.name and not using curly braces when os.name == 'dos' or os.name == 'nt', the getstatusoutput can be made to work on Windows.
Logged In: YES user_id=469548 The commands module is going to stay Unix-specific. There are too many potential issues with trying to support the various win32 command interpreters. See http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-August/047774.ht ml and its responses.