The standard python library has a module called commands with three nice simple functions to run a command and get its output and its status.
The first one is called commands.getstatusoutput(cmd), it runs the given
command and returns its exit status and its output.
The second one is called commands.getoutput(cmd), it runs the given command
and returns its output, ignoring the exit status.
The third one is called commands.getstatus(cmd), it runs the given command
and returns its exit status, ignoring the output.
Actually, no.
The third one is called getstatus(file), it runs the command ls -ld file
(with proper shell escaping) and returns its output.
>>> commands.getstatusoutput("echo ciao")
(0, 'ciao')
>>> commands.getoutput("echo ciao")
'ciao'
>>> commands.getstatus("echo ciao")
'ls: echo ciao: No such file or directory'
>>> commands.getstatus("/bin/echo")
'-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 19304 2006-08-31 14:25 /bin/echo'
Every time I think of this getstatus, I quickly convince myself that I
misread the documentation. Then I rerun the example above.