A complete process: subprocess.run

We demonstrate this tool with the most standard and simple UNIX command, ls—the command for listing the content of a directory. It comes with various optional arguments; for example, ls -l displays the list with extended information.

To execute this command within a Python script, we use subprocess.run. The simplest usage is using only one argument, a list with the Linux command split into several text strings:

import subprocess as sp
res = sp.run(['ls','-l'])

The module shlex provides a special tool for performing this split: 

_import shlex
command_list = shlex.split('ls -l') # returns ['ls', '-l']

It also respects empty spaces in filenames and does not use those as separators.

The command run displays the result of the Linux command and the subprocess.CompletedProcess object res.

To execute UNIX commands in this way is quite useless. Mostly, you want to process the output. Therefore...