How execute cat filename* in python

Question

I'm really new to python and after several hours of looking I haven't been able to find a solution (or failed to understand the solutions provided by other people).

I wanted to check the contents of several files with the same initial name 'pid' followed by a non-consecutive integer in a folder to make sure they all contained the word 'done'. The files contain a single word.

My initial idea was to use

cat pid*

somehow get the outputs of that command into a list and then just transverse the list comparing the values

result = 'Finished'
for x in range(len(myList)):
    if 'done' not in myList[x]:
        result = 'Continue'
        break
if result == 'Finished':
    print 'Finished'

that was my idea, but I can't find the way of getting that list containing the output of cat.

After some digging around I gave up on the idea and made a really POOR implementation (I think) I'm sure there has to be a better solution

filedir = os.popen('ls','r')

for line in filedir:
    print line
    if 'pid' in line:
        filename = open(line.replace('\n', ''), 'r')
        firstline = filename.readline()
        print firstline
        if 'done' not in firstline:
            status = 'RUNNING'
            break
if status == 'DONE':
    print 'Finished'
else:
    print status

Any help is really appreciated!

Answer 1

You can use the glob module, which "finds all the pathnames matching a specified pattern according to the rules used by the Unix shell":

import glob
for fn in glob.glob('pid*'):
    with open(fn) as f:
        if 'done' in f.read():
            ...

Answer 2

Use glob to perform the wildcard match and then read the files.

And please... stop calling shell commands for things that can be easily done in python itself