How to call an external program in python and retrieve the output and return code?

Question

How can I call an external program with a python script and retrieve the output and return code?

Answer 1

Following Ambroz Bizjak's previous comment, here is a solution that worked for me:

import shlex
from subprocess import Popen, PIPE

cmd = "..."
process = Popen(shlex.split(cmd), stdout=PIPE)
process.communicate()
exit_code = process.wait()