Storing value from a parsed ping

Question

I'm working on some code that performs a ping operation from python and extracts only the latency by using awk. This is currently what I have:

from os import system
l = system("ping -c 1 sitename | awk -F = 'FNR==2 {print substr($4,1,length($4)-3)}'")
print l

The system() call works fine, but I get an output in terminal rather than the value storing into l. Basically, an example output I'd get from this particular block of code would be

90.3
0

Why does this happen, and how would I go about actually storing that value into l? This is part of a larger thing I'm working on, so preferably I'd like to keep it in native python.

Out of curiosity, wouldn't it be easier to do the string parsing in Python? — Jud, Nov 13 '13 at 22:08

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:05

3

Use subprocess.check_output if you want to store the output in a variable:

from subprocess import check_output
l = check_output("ping -c 1 sitename | awk -F = 'FNR==2 {print substr($4,1,length($4)-3)}'", shell=True) 
print l

Related: Extra zero after executing a python script

edited May 23 '17 at 12:05

Community

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answered Nov 13 '13 at 22:06

Ashwini Chaudhary

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score 1 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:19

1

os.system() returns the return code of the called command, not the output to stdout.

For detail on how to properly get the command's output (including pre-Python 2.7), see this: Running shell command from Python and capturing the output

edited May 23 '17 at 12:19

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answered Nov 13 '13 at 22:09

Jud

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score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 13 '13 at 22:10

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BTW I would use Ping Package https://pypi.python.org/pypi/ping

It looks promising

answered Nov 13 '13 at 22:10

slashmili

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score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Nov 14 '13 at 06:57

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Here is how I store output to a variable.

test=$(ping -c 1 google.com | awk -F"=| " 'NR==2 {print $11}')
echo "$test"
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answered Nov 14 '13 at 06:57

Jotne

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Storing value from a parsed ping

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