If all you need is the stdout output, then take a look at subprocess.check_output():

import subprocess

batcmd="dir"
result = subprocess.check_output(batcmd, shell=True)

Because you were using os.system(), you'd have to set shell=True to get the same behaviour. You do want to heed the security concerns about passing untrusted arguments to your shell.

If you need to capture stderr as well, simply add stderr=subprocess.STDOUT to the call:

result = subprocess.check_output([batcmd], stderr=subprocess.STDOUT)

to redirect the error output to the default output stream.

If you know that the output is text, add text=True to decode the returned bytes value with the platform default encoding; use encoding="..." instead if that codec is not correct for the data you receive.

I would advice using a library for using REST from python, eg requests http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/index.html

r = requests.get('http://localhost:8080/geoserver/rest/workspaces/myworkspace/datastores/mydatastore/featuretypes?list=available', auth=('admin', 'geoserver'))

then use r.text or r.json

From this question which I asked a long time ago, what you may want to use is popen:

os.popen('cat /etc/services').read()

From the docs for Python 3.6,

This is implemented using subprocess.Popen; see that class’s documentation for more powerful ways to manage and communicate with subprocesses.

Here's the corresponding code for subprocess:

import subprocess

proc = subprocess.Popen(["cat", "/etc/services"], stdout=subprocess.PIPE, shell=True)
(out, err) = proc.communicate()
print("program output:", out)

os.system() just runs the process, it doesn't capture the output:

If command generates any output, it will be sent to the interpreter standard output stream.

The return value is the exit code of the process:

On Unix, the return value is the exit status of the process encoded in the format specified for wait().

You'll need to use something like subprocess.check_output() or subprocess.Popen() directly to capture the output.

>>> arch = subprocess.check_output("uname -a | awk '{print $9}'", shell=True);
>>> arch
'x86_64\n'

Use subprocess:

import subprocess
print(subprocess.check_output(['nslookup', 'google.com']))

If the return code is not zero it will raise a CalledProcessError exception:

try:
    print(subprocess.check_output(['nslookup', 'google.com']))
except subprocess.CalledProcessError as err:
    print(err)

os.system only returns the exit code of the command. Here 0 means success. Any other number stands for an operating-system-dependent error. The output goes to stdout of this process. subprocess intends to replace os.system.

subprocess.check_output is a convenience wrapper around subprocess.Popen that simplifies your use case.

There are many good SO links on this one. try Running shell command from Python and capturing the output or Assign output of os.system to a variable and prevent it from being displayed on the screen for starters. In short

import subprocess
direct_output = subprocess.check_output('ls', shell=True) #could be anything here.

The shell=True flag should be used with caution:

From the docs: Warning

Invoking the system shell with shell=True can be a security hazard if combined with untrusted input. See the warning under Frequently Used Arguments for details.

See for much more info: http://docs.python.org/2/library/subprocess.html