Get output of system ping without printing to the console

Question

I want to call ping from Python and get the output. I tried the following:

response = os.system(\"ping \"+ \"- c\")

However,

Answer 1

To get the output of a command, use subprocess.check_output. It raises an error if the command fails, so surround it in a try block.

import subprocess

try:
    response = subprocess.check_output(
        ['ping', '-c', '3', '10.10.0.100'],
        stderr=subprocess.STDOUT,  # get all output
        universal_newlines=True  # return string not bytes
    )
except subprocess.CalledProcessError:
    response = None

---

To use ping to know whether an address is responding, use its return value, which is 0 for success. subprocess.check_call will raise and error if the return value is not 0. To suppress output, redirect stdout and stderr. With Python 3 you can use subprocess.DEVNULL rather than opening the null file in a block.

import os
import subprocess

with open(os.devnull, 'w') as DEVNULL:
    try:
        subprocess.check_call(
            ['ping', '-c', '3', '10.10.0.100'],
            stdout=DEVNULL,  # suppress output
            stderr=DEVNULL
        )
        is_up = True
    except subprocess.CalledProcessError:
        is_up = False

---

_{In general, use subprocess calls, which, as the docs describe, are intended to replace os.system.}