distutils.spawn Provides the 'spawn()' function, a front-end to various platform- specific functions for launching another program in a sub-process. Also provides the 'find_executable()' to search the path for a given executable name.
| Function | find |
Tries to find 'executable' in the directories listed in 'path'. |
| Function | spawn |
Run another program, specified as a command list 'cmd', in a new process. |
Tries to find 'executable' in the directories listed in 'path'. A string listing directories separated by 'os.pathsep'; defaults to os.environ['PATH']. Returns the complete filename or None if not found.
Run another program, specified as a command list 'cmd', in a new process. 'cmd' is just the argument list for the new process, ie. cmd[0] is the program to run and cmd[1:] are the rest of its arguments. There is no way to run a program with a name different from that of its executable. If 'search_path' is true (the default), the system's executable search path will be used to find the program; otherwise, cmd[0] must be the exact path to the executable. If 'dry_run' is true, the command will not actually be run. Raise DistutilsExecError if running the program fails in any way; just return on success.