How to use subprocess popen Python

In the recent Python version, subprocess has a big change. It offers a brand-new class Popen to handle os.popen1|2|3|4.

The new subprocess.Popen()

import subprocess
subprocess.Popen('ls -la', shell=True)

Its arguments:

subprocess.Popen(args, 
                bufsize=0, 
                executable=None, 
                stdin=None, stdout=None, stderr=None, 
                preexec_fn=None, close_fds=False, 
                shell=False, 
                cwd=None, env=None, 
                universal_newlines=False, 
                startupinfo=None, 
                creationflags=0)

Simply put, the new Popen includes all the features which were split into 4 separate old popen.

The old popen:

Method  Arguments
popen   stdout
popen2  stdin, stdout
popen3  stdin, stdout, stderr
popen4  stdin, stdout and stderr

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subprocess.Popen takes a list of arguments:

from subprocess import Popen, PIPE

process = Popen(['swfdump', '/tmp/filename.swf', '-d'], stdout=PIPE, stderr=PIPE)
stdout, stderr = process.communicate()

There's even a section of the documentation devoted to helping users migrate from os.popen to subprocess.