[Python-Dev] 'commands' module on Win32 (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at iinet.net.au
Fri Aug 13 12:39:26 CEST 2004

Bug #1008275 refers to attempting to run commands.getstatusoutput() on win32, and the fact that it breaks.

The reason it breaks is because it expects a posix shell, and this is noted in the documentation for the module (or rather, the module is noted as only supported on Unix).

commands.getstatusoutput() and commands.getoutput() can easily be fixed to run properly on Windows (using "if os.name == 'posix'" to select the correct formatting for the shell command). Only the first one actually needs to be fixed, since getoutput() just returns the second element of the tuple returned by getstatusoutput()

The dirty holdout is commands.getstatus().

This function does not simply return the first element of the tuple returned by commands.getstatusoutput() as you might expect. Instead of returning the status code resulting from executing its argument as a shell command, it insteads calls 'ls -ld ' to get the file information. (And this is a function in the commands module exactly why?)

This actually works for me, but only because I have MSYS & MINGW installed :)

Anyway, getstatusoutput() and getoutput() seem like very handy ways to make a command line call and get its results. I'd never seen them before because they're squirelled away as Unix specific modules.

Are there any objections to changing this module so that only getstatus() is marked as Unix specific?

I ask, because I don't want to start work on a documentation patch if the idea is a non-starter (the code & test changes are already done, butI think the hardest part of the exercise will be moving the documentation out of the 'Unix-specific' part of the doc tree).

Cheers, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan | Eugene, Oregon Email: ncoghlan at email.com | USA

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