[TIP] [tox] Capturing output from commands

[Ian Cordasco]

So, let's look at how we might take a command from tox and use
subprocess to run it:

import shlex
import subprocess

command_string = 'echo "foo" > ex.txt'
p = subprocess.Popen(shlex.split(command_string),
stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE)
(out, _) = p.communicate()
print(out)

What you'll see printed is:

"foo" > ex.txt

In other words, subprocess is limited to being secure by default and
doesn't allow shell redirection for good reasons. What you can do
instead is write a tiny bash/bat script that does the redirection for
you and then call that. Alternatively you could teach the program to
put its output into a file. (Flake8, for example, added --output-file
for this exact use case quite a while back.)

In other words, to add redirection into tox you have to teach it about
shell semantics and potentially weaken its security stance.



On Mon, Jun 13, 2016 at 3:14 PM, André Caron <andre.l.caron at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks, I'll take a crack at that!
>
> I hadn't noticed before, but by fiddling around a bit, but it looks like:
> - Tox merges stdout and stderr of the commands into Tox's stdout.
> - shell redirection inside the commands doesn't work (at least on Windows).
>
> Intuitively, I would expect stderr from my commands to be forwarded to
> stderr.  Since this is not the case, I was willing to fall back onto
> redirecting stdout from my process directly to a file, but then I can't do
> that inside my Tox.ini file as my command gets the ">foo.log" as a CLI
> argument.
>
> Is there any non-obvious rationale for this?  If not, would you consider
> changes in this behavior?
>
> Thanks!
>
> André
>
>
> On Mon, Jun 13, 2016 at 12:54 PM, Florian Bruhin <me at the-compiler.org>
> wrote:
>>
>> Hey André,
>>
>> * André Caron <andre.l.caron at gmail.com> [2016-06-13 12:07:37 -0400]:
>> > I looked through Tox' docs and CLI help, but I can't find a "silent"
>> > mode
>> > or a way to force (only) Tox to write to stderr.
>> >
>> > Do you have anything to recommend?  If not, any chance you would
>> > consider a
>> > patch to introduce a silent mode or a config change to send Tox' logs to
>> > stederr?
>>
>> There's an issue for a -q flag, but nobody worked on it so far:
>> https://bitbucket.org/hpk42/tox/issues/256/
>>
>> I still want to work on that, but never got to it with all the other
>> FOSS stuff I do :) So if you want to work on a patch, please do!
>>
>> Florian
>>
>> --
>> http://www.the-compiler.org | me at the-compiler.org (Mail/XMPP)
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>
>
>
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