Using subprocess to run Python script on Windows

Is there a simple way to run a Python script on Windows/Linux/OS X?

On the latter two, subprocess.Popen("/the/script.py") works, but on Windows I get the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "test_functional.py", line 91, in test_functional
    log = tvnamerifiy(tmp)
  File "test_functional.py", line 49, in tvnamerifiy
    stdout = PIPE
  File "C:\Python26\lib\subprocess.py", line 595, in __init__
    errread, errwrite)
  File "C:\Python26\lib\subprocess.py", line 804, in _execute_child
    startupinfo)
WindowsError: [Error 193] %1 is not a valid Win32 application

monkut's comment: The use case isn't clear. Why use subprocess to run a python script? Is there something preventing you from importing the script and calling the necessary function?

I was writing a quick script to test the overall functionality of a Python-command-line tool (to test it on various platforms). Basically it had to create a bunch of files in a temp folder, run the script on this and check the files were renamed correctly.

I could have imported the script and called the function, but since it relies on sys.argv and uses sys.exit(), I would have needed to do something like..

import sys
import tvnamer
sys.argv.append("-b", "/the/folder")
try:
    tvnamer.main()
except BaseException, errormsg:
    print type(errormsg)

Also, I wanted to capture the stdout and stderr for debugging incase something went wrong.

Of course a better way would be to write the script in more unit-testable way, but the script is basically "done" and I'm doing a final batch of testing before doing a "1.0" release (after which I'm going to do a rewrite/restructure, which will be far tidier and more testable)

Basically, it was much easier to simply run the script as a process, after finding the sys.executable variable. I would have written it as a shell-script, but that wouldn't have been cross-platform. The final script can be found here

Just found sys.executable - the full path to the current Python executable, which can be used to run the script (instead of relying on the shbang, which obviously doesn't work on Windows)

import sys
import subprocess

theproc = subprocess.Popen([sys.executable, "myscript.py"])
theproc.communicate()

How about this:

import sys
import subprocess

theproc = subprocess.Popen("myscript.py", shell = True)
theproc.communicate()                   # ^^^^^^^^^^^^

This tells subprocess to use the OS shell to open your script, and works on anything that you can just run in cmd.exe.

Additionally, this will search the PATH for "myscript.py" - which could be desirable.