System Call in Python via MINGW32 on Windows

Question

I am trying to figure out a way to call wget from my python script on a windows machine. I have wget installed under /bin on the machine. Making a call using the subprocess or os modules seems to raise errors no matter what I try. I'm assuming this is related to the fact that I need to route my python system call through minGW so that wget is recognized.

Does anyone know how to handle this?

Thanks

Answer 1

There's no such thing as under "MinGW". You probably mean under MSYS, a Unix emulation environment for Windows. MSYS makes things look like Unix, but you're still running everything under Windows. In particular MSYS maps /bin to the drive and directory where you install MSYS. If you installed MSYS to C:\\MSYS then your MSYS /bin directory is really C:\\MSYS\\bin .

When you add /bin to your MSYS PATH environment variable, MSYS searches the directory C:\\MSYS\\bin . When you add /bin to the Windows PATH environment using the command SETX , Windows will look in the \\bin directory of the current drive.

Presumably your version of Python is the standard Windows port of Python. Since it's a normal Windows application, it doesn't interpret the PATH environment variable the way you're expecting it to. With /bin in the path, it will search the \\bin directory of the current drive. Since wget is in C:\\MSYS\\bin not \\bin of the current directory you an error when trying to run it from Python.

Note that if you run a Windows command from the MSYS shell, MSYS will automatically convert its PATH to a Windows compatible format, changing MSYS pathnames into Windows pathnames. This means you should be able to get your Python script to work by running Python from the MSYS shell.