How to Run Linux Terminal Command in Python in New Terminal

Execute terminal command from python in new terminal window?

There's no way to do this in general from a shell. What you have to do is run the terminal program itself, or some launcher program that does so for you. And the way to do that is different for each terminal program.

In some cases, os.startfile will do what you want, but this isn't going to be universal.

Also, note in general, you're going to actually need an absolute path to your script, because the new terminal window will be running a new shell and therefore won't necessarily have your same working directory. But I'll ignore that for the examples.


With Windows cmd, the easiest way to do it is the start shell command. If the thing you start is any command-line program, including python, it will get a new cmd window. So, something like:

subprocess.call('start /wait python bb.py', shell=True)

OS X has a similar command, open. And it's a real program rather than a shell command, so you don't need shell=True. However, running a command-line program or script with open doesn't generally open a new terminal window. In fact, the whole point of it is to allow you to run programs as if they were being double-clicked in Finder, which never runs something in the terminal unless it's a .command file.

So, you can create a temporary .command wrapper file and open that; something like this (untested):

with tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile(suffix='.command') as f:
f.write('#!/bin/sh\npython bb.py\n')
subprocess.call(['open', '-W', f.name])

Alternatively, you can explicitly tell open to use Terminal.app, something like this:

subprocess.call(['open', '-W', '-a', 'Terminal.app', 'python', '--args', 'bb.py'])

Or you can script Terminal.app via AppleEvents. For example:

appscript.app('Terminal').do_script('python bb.py')

The "do script" event opens a new window and runs its argument as a command. If you want more detailed control, open the scripting dictionary in AppleScript Editor and see all the fun stuff you can do.


On Linux or other *nix systems… well, there are 65,102 different desktop environments, launchers, and terminal programs. Do you need to work on all of them?

With gnome-terminal, just running the terminal again gives you a new window, and the -x argument lets you specify an initial command, so:

subprocess.call(['gnome-terminal', '-x', 'python bb.py'])

Many older terminals try to be compatible with xterm, which does the same thing with -e, so:

subprocess.call(['xterm', '-e', 'python bb.py'])
subprocess.call(['rxvt', '-e', 'python bb.py'])

… etc.

How do you know which terminal the user is using? Good question. You could walk the like of parent processes from yourself until you find something that looks like a terminal. Or you could just assume everyone has xterm. Or you could look at how various distros configure a default terminal and search for all of them. Or…

Open new gnome-terminal and run command

Like most terminals, gnome terminal needs options to execute commands:

gnome-terminal [-e, --command=STRING] [-x, --execute]

You probably need to add -x option:

x, --execute

Execute the remainder of the command line inside the terminal.

so:

os.system("gnome-terminal -x python f.py")

That would not run your process in the background unless you add & to your command line BTW.

The communicate attempt would need a newline for your input but should work too, but complex processes like terminals don't "like" being redirected. It seems like using an interactive tool backwards.
And again, that would block until termination. What could work would be to use p.stdin.write("python f.py\n") to give control to the python script. But in that case it's unlikely to work.

So it seems that you don't even need python do to what you want. You just need to run

python f.py &

in a shell.

run os.system commands on a new terminal- Python 3

can this solve your problem?

os.system('gnome-terminal -x chromium-browser')

How to open a subprocess (within a python script) in new terminal and kill it after 15 seconds (Platform: Ubuntu)

Try this :

import subprocess
import time

proc = subprocess.Popen(('gnome-terminal', '--', 'file_name.sh'))
time.sleep(15)
subprocess.Popen(('pkill', '-f', 'file_name.sh'))


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