Wildcard not working in subprocess call using shlex

--------------------------------------------------
Hire the world's top talent on demand or became one of them at Toptal: https://topt.al/25cXVn
and get $2,000 discount on your first invoice
--------------------------------------------------

Music by Eric Matyas
https://www.soundimage.org
Track title: Unforgiving Himalayas Looping

--

Chapters
00:00 Wildcard Not Working In Subprocess Call Using Shlex
01:27 Accepted Answer Score 5
01:53 Thank you

--

Full question
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7156...

--

Content licensed under CC BY-SA
https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/lice...

--

Tags
#python #subprocess #shlex

#avk47

ACCEPTED ANSWER

Score 5

For replacing the * with what it means, you either need the shell or you need the glob module. So the easiest way would be shell=True (if the command is constant, I do not see any security holes).

Another approach would be

#!/usr/bin/python
import subprocess
import shlex
import glob

cmd = 'sudo rm -rf /work/TEST/*'
arg = shlex.split(cmd)
arg = arg[:-1] + glob.glob(arg[-1])

# This should work now
p = subprocess.Popen(arg)

or, if you would nevertheless append the path by yourself,

cmd = 'sudo rm -rf'
basearg = shlex.split(cmd)
arg = basearg + glob.glob(path+"/*")