running a command line containing Pipes and displaying result to STDOUT

Question

How would one call a shell command from Python which contains a pipe and capture the output?

Suppose the command was something like:

cat file.log |          


        

Answer 1

import subprocess
task = subprocess.Popen("cat file.log | tail -1", shell=True, stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
data = task.stdout.read()
assert task.wait() == 0

Note that this does not capture stderr. And if you want to capture stderr as well, you'll need to use task.communicate(); calling task.stdout.read() and then task.stderr.read() can deadlock if the buffer for stderr fills. If you want them combined, you should be able to use 2>&1 as part of the shell command.

But given your exact case,

task = subprocess.Popen(['tail', '-1', 'file.log'], stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
data = task.stdout.read()
assert task.wait() == 0

avoids the need for the pipe at all.