Dev: Cookbook

Description

A series of Python/Spyder common recipes to take into account when coding

Python

Operating system (OS) specific operations

import os
import sys

# Operations for windows only
if os.name == 'nt':
    pass

# Operations for linux only
if sys.platform.startswith('linux'):
    pass

# Operations for Mac only
if sys.platform == 'darwin':
    pass

# Operations for unix (linux and mac)
if os.name != 'nt':
    pass

Spyder specific

Don't use subprocess.Popen

Instead, use programs.run_shell_command and programs.run_program to launch external programs. These wrapper functions make sure that the correct flags are set for each platform. For example, close_fds is set on POSIX, while on Windows the creation of a separate CMD shell window is disabled (under certain circumstances, this window would quickly flash in the background when the external call was performed). These wrappers also set stdout, stdin and stderr to subprocess.PIPE by default. Have a look at the implementation in programs.py for further details. There are also a few examples of calls scattered throughout the source code.

All extra kwargs in both run_shell_command() and run_program() are passed through internally to subprocess.Popen(), so you can override any of the default behaviour.

Example using run_shell_command()

from programs import run_shell_command

pipe = run_shell_command('ls -la')
output = pipe.stdout.read()

Example using run_program()

from programs import run_program

proc = run_program('/usr/bin/python', ['-V'], cwd='/Users/caleb')
output, err = proc.communicate()