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pythonlinuxsubprocesspopen

How can I execute two commands in terminal using Python's subprocess module?

How can I use the subprocess module (i.e. call, check_call and Popen) to run more than one command?

For instance, lets say I wanted to execute the ls command twice in quick sucession, the following syntax does not work

import subprocess
subprocess.check_call(['ls', 'ls'])

returns:

CalledProcessError: Command '['ls', 'ls']' returned non-zero exit status 2.
Solution

  • You can use && or ;:

    $ ls && ls
file.txt file2.txt
file.txt file2.txt

$ ls; ls
file.txt file2.txt
file.txt file2.txt

    The difference is that in case of && the second command will be executed only if the first one was successful (try false && ls) unlike the ; in which case the command will be executed independently from the first execution.

    So, Python code will be:

    import subprocess
subprocess.run(["ls; ls"], shell=True)