python 3 open terminal and run program

Question

I made a small script in sublime that will extract commands from a json file that is on the user's computer and then it will open the terminal and run the settings/command. This works, except that it doesn't really open up the terminal. It only runs the command (and it works, as in my case it will run gcc to compile a simple C file), and pipes to STDOUT without opening up the terminal.

import json
import subprocess

import sublime_plugin

class CompilerCommand(sublime_plugin.TextCommand):
    def get_dir(self, fullpath):
        path = fullpath.split("\\")
        path.pop()
        path = "\\".join(path)
        return path

    def get_settings(self, path):
        _settings_path = path + "\\compiler_settings.json"
        return json.loads(open(_settings_path).read())    

    def run(self, edit):
        _path = self.get_dir(self.view.file_name())
        _settings = self.get_settings(_path)
        _driver = _path.split("\\")[0]

        _command = _driver + " && cd " + _path + " && " + _settings["compile"] + " && " + _settings["exec"]
        proc = subprocess.Popen(_command, shell=True, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.STDOUT)

I'm not sure if using subprocess.Popen is the right way to go about it as I'm new to Python.

So to re-iterate; I want it to open up the terminal, run the command, and have the terminal stay open until the user presses ENTER or something. I'm running Windows 7 and Python 3, if that matters.

Answer 1

subprocess.Popen simply creates a subprocess with the given command. It is in no way related to opening a terminal window or any other windows for that matter.

You'll have to look into your platform specific UI automation solutions in order to achieve what you want. Or see if maybe the Sublime plugins mechanism can already do that.

NOTES:

Also, you should be using os.path.join / os.path.split / os.path.sep etc for your path operations—Sublime also runs on OS X for example, and OS X does not use backslashes. Also, file handles need to be closed, so use:

with open(...) as f:
    return json.load(f)  # also not that there is no nead to f.read()+json.loads()
                         # if you can just json.load() on the file handle

Furthermore, strings should usually be built using string interpolation:

_command = "{} && cd {} && {} && {}".format(_driver, _path, _settings["compile"], _settings["exec"])

...and, you should not be prefixing your local variables with _ —it doesn't look nice and serves no purpose in Python either; and while we're at it, I might as well use the chance to recommend you to read PEP8: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/ .