subprocess.check_output() doesn't seem to exist (Python 2.6.5)

Question

I\'ve been reading the Python documentation about the subprocess module (see here) and it talks about a subprocess.check_output() command which seems to be exac

Answer 1

Thanks to the monkey patch suggestion (and my attempts failing - but we were consuming CalledProcessError output, so needed to monkey patch that)

found a working 2.6 patch here: http://pydoc.net/Python/pep8radius/0.9.0/pep8radius.shell/

"""Note: We also monkey-patch subprocess for python 2.6 to
give feature parity with later versions.
"""
try:
    from subprocess import STDOUT, check_output, CalledProcessError
except ImportError:  # pragma: no cover
    # python 2.6 doesn't include check_output
    # monkey patch it in!
    import subprocess
    STDOUT = subprocess.STDOUT

    def check_output(*popenargs, **kwargs):
        if 'stdout' in kwargs:  # pragma: no cover
            raise ValueError('stdout argument not allowed, '
                             'it will be overridden.')
        process = subprocess.Popen(stdout=subprocess.PIPE,
                                   *popenargs, **kwargs)
        output, _ = process.communicate()
        retcode = process.poll()
        if retcode:
            cmd = kwargs.get("args")
            if cmd is None:
                cmd = popenargs[0]
            raise subprocess.CalledProcessError(retcode, cmd,
                                                output=output)
        return output
    subprocess.check_output = check_output

    # overwrite CalledProcessError due to `output`
    # keyword not being available (in 2.6)
    class CalledProcessError(Exception):

        def __init__(self, returncode, cmd, output=None):
            self.returncode = returncode
            self.cmd = cmd
            self.output = output

        def __str__(self):
            return "Command '%s' returned non-zero exit status %d" % (
                self.cmd, self.returncode)
    subprocess.CalledProcessError = CalledProcessError