Pycharm, importError no module name, when using os.system

Question

I'm building in Pycharm a script (let's call it script1 ) that calls another script (let's call it script2 ) that take parameters as input

script2 is using in it xlrd ( import xlrd ) when I run script2 manually and give it the needed parameters, it works very well

script1 , calls script2 (using os.system() ) as follow:

os.system("python script2 -param1 ..")

and I get this error:

from file script2

import xlrd

ImportError: No module named 'xlrd'

does anyone know how to fix it? or make it work correctly?

I made sure of the parameters I give as input, they are right and xlrd is defined in project interpreter

Thanks a lot

Answer 1

Make sure both files are in the same folder. Do you have more than one installation/virtualenv of python?

A better option to ruse python code is defining functions and importing them:

#script2.py
import xlrd
def foo():
    print("I AM IN FOO NOW!")

#script1.py
import script2
script2.foo()

If yo are sure about calling script2 in a different process, consider using subprocess.check_output as a somewhat better API.

Answer 2

You are probably calling the wrong python. If running python script2... from the command line works, use where python to get the full path and use it when calling os.system , for example:

os.system("c:\pythons7\python script2 -param1 ..")

(BTW - It is recommended to replace os.system with subprocess.call or some other subprocess function)

Answer 3

Something that has helped me fix this issue in the past is appending the main file path at the top of the script you are running through os.system

 import sys # for sys.path.append('/home/user/your_folder_with_python_scripts')