> I'd like to know what are the differences at the various os.popenX > flavors. I read the documentation and I can see they return file > objects..... so what can you do with these file objects? I mean, why > would you need a set of file objects rather than another?
My OS topic covers some of the popen variants with explanation. It might help. Here are the most relevant two paragraphs: -------------- In fact there are several variations of the popen command called popen, popen2, popen3 and popen4. The numbers refer to the various data stream combinations that are made available. The standard data streams were described in a sidebar in the Talking to the User topic. The basic version of popen simply creates a single data stream where all input/output is sent/received depending on a mode parameter passed to the function. In essence it tries to make executing a command look like using a file object. By contrast, popen2 offers two streams, one for standard output and another for standard input, so we can send data to the process and read the output without closing the process. popen3 provides stderr access in addition to stdin/stdout. Finally there is popen4 that combines stderr and stdout into a single stream which appears very like normal console output. In Python 2.4 all of these popen calls have been superseded by a new Popen class found in a new subprocess module which we will look at later. For now we will only look at the standard os.popen() function, the others I will leave as a research exercise! --------------- Alan Gauld Author of the Learn to Program web site http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/alan.gauld _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
