os.popen()

os.popen(cmd, mode='r', buffering=-1)

Open a pipe to or from command cmd. The return value is an open file object connected to the pipe, which can be read or written depending on whether mode is 'r' (default) or 'w'. The buffering argument has the same meaning as the corresponding argument to the built-in open() function. The returned file object reads or writes text strings rather than bytes.

The close method returns None if the subprocess exited successfully, or the subprocess’s return code if there was an error. On POSIX systems, if the return code is positive it represents the return value of the process left-shifted by one byte. If the return code is negative, the process was terminated by the signal given by the negated value of the return code. (For example, the return value might be - signal.SIGKILL if the subprocess was killed.) On Windows systems, the return value contains the signed integer return code from the child process.

This is implemented using subprocess.Popen; see that class’s documentation for more powerful ways to manage and communicate with subprocesses.