Using subprocess.call to open a program

Question

I'm writing an automation program and I'm using subprocess.call to open Google Chrome. The code for this is

from subprocess import call
...
call('google-chrome')

When I run this program through the terminal Chrome launches but it remains tied to the terminal. If I try call('google-chrome &') I get No such file or directory in my traceback. ($ google-chrome & when entered in terminal will launch Chrome but it won't tie it to the terminal).

I've also tried call(['google-chrome', '&']) but this opens Chrome still tied to the terminal but it thinks the & is an argument for a website I want to open.

Should I be using subprocess.call for this?

Martijn Pieters · Accepted Answer · 2013-11-18 17:17:37Z

3

Don't use call(); it'll wait for the process to complete.

Use the subprocess.Popen() class directly, without waiting:

from subprocess import Popen

Popen(['google-chrome'])

You can redirect its output to the bit bin, if desired:

from subprocess import Popen, STDOUT
import os

Popen(['google-chrome'], stdout=os.open(os.devnull, os.O_RDWR), stderr=STDOUT)

If all you want do do is spawn a browser with a given URL, take a look at the webbrowser module; it uses the same call under the hood to spawn a browser process in the background (including the redirection to /dev/null). Although Google Chrome is not listed on the documentation page, the 2.7.5 source code of the module does list google-chrome and chrome as recognized browser strings.

edited Nov 18, 2013 at 17:17

answered Nov 18, 2013 at 16:39

Martijn Pieters

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7 Comments

Nanor Over a year ago

This seems to have worked but it's still printing tracebacks when I use Chrome as I normally would.

Martijn Pieters Over a year ago

'still printing tracebacks'? Not sure what you mean.

Nanor Over a year ago

I have a debug message to print after it launches Chrome and it prints. After that however there's a lot of information appearing in my terminal coming from Chrome. See this screenshot.

Martijn Pieters Over a year ago

I've added an option to discard all output from Chrome, by redirecting its stdout and stderr to /dev/null.

Martijn Pieters Over a year ago

@Nanor: I cannot reproduce your problem; with the /dev/null redirection I don't see output to the console anymore. Are you certain you are running the correct code and that no pre-existing Chrome browser was open?

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