Save the output of a command in a string in linux using python

Question

I am using Fedora 17 xfce and I am programming in Python 2.7.3. Fedora uses a package manager called yum. I have a python script that searches for packages like this:

Answer 1

You would want to use the subprocess module for that, since os.system() simply returns the exit code of a command:

from subprocess import check_output
out = check_output(['yum', 'list', raw_input('package name')])

You could also use Yum's API directly to search packages:

from yum import YumBase

base = YumBase()
for package, name in base.searchGenerator(['name'], ['python']):
    print(package.name, package.version)