On Tue, 1 Nov 2016 04:00 pm, Wildman wrote: > You are correct about that but, in this case grep never "sees" the '$' > sign. Bash expands $USER to the actual user name beforehand. If you > are on a Linux system, enter this into a terminal to illustrate: > > sudo grep ^$USER\: /etc/shadow
Bash is not involved here. Python is calling grep directly. You don't have to believe us, you can test this yourself. Create a simple text file with a single line containing your username, and a simple Python script that calls grep as you have been: [steve@ando ~]$ echo $USER steve [steve@ando ~]$ cat foo.txt blah blah steve blah blah [steve@ando ~]$ cat greptest.py import subprocess cmdlist = ['grep', '$USER', 'foo.txt'] p = subprocess.Popen(cmdlist, stdout=subprocess.PIPE,stderr=subprocess.PIPE) line, err = p.communicate() print err, line [steve@ando ~]$ python2.7 greptest.py [steve@ando ~]$ So there you have it: categorical proof that bash does not expand the string '$USER'. It cannot: bash is not involved in the subprocess call. Python calls grep directly. If you want to expand the '$USER' string from Python, do it yourself: py> import os py> os.environ['USER'] 'steve' > If the user name is ben then grep would see this: > > grep ben\: /etc/shadow If would, if you called grep from bash. But you didn't. >>> > Maybe you are expecting Bash to be involved somehow (and so “$USER” >>> > will be substituted by Bash with some other value). That's not what >>> > happens. >>> >>> No, the shell is already running. >> >> I don't know what you mean by this. If you mean that some *other* >> instances of the shell ar running: that isn't relevant to how your >> Python program invokes a subprocess. > > I simply meant that the script is run from a terminal. That's irrelevant. Just because the script is running from a terminal doesn't mean that the shell can peer deep inside each and every process and magically apply the shell's string expansion rules. -- Steve “Cheer up,” they said, “things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure enough, things got worse. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list