The subprocess call suite

The subprocess module provides another function that makes process spawning a safer operation than using Popen(). The subprocess call() function waits for the called command/program to finish reading the output. It supports the same arguments as the Popen() constructor, such as shell, executable, and cwd, but this time, your script will wait for the program to complete and populate the return code without the need to communicate().

If you inspect the call() function, you will see that it's actually a wrapper around the Popen() class, but with a wait() function that waits until the end of the command before returning the output:

import subprocess
subprocess.call(["ifconfig", "docker0"], stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=None, shell=False)

If you want more protection for your code, you can use the check_call() function. It's the same as call(), but adds another check to the return code. If it is equal to 0 (meaning that the command has successfully executed), then the...