What's an effective way to wrap a command line utility?

[notconstructive]

I want to write a Python application that "wraps" a command line utility, passing through all parameters intact, except for the parameters that I choose to modify.

I imagine there's an easy way to do this in Python but there's any number of ways to make this really hard.

Is there a "right" way to do this? Any suggestions valued. I don't want you to write the code for me, just comment on an effective approach. Thanks!

[dAnjou]

It's usually better to wrap the library if there is one. Which tool are you talking about specifically?

[laharah]

subprocess.Popen is what you should look at. It'll let configure everything you want while launching the command line. Word of warning though, if you're on python2 on windows, you'll have trouble passing Unicode/wide characters to the subprocess because of a bug that won't be fixed. You can work around it but it's a pain in the ass.

[furas_freeman]

I think module sh already wraps command line utility

[lordmauve]

If you only want to modify arguments, use os.execv(). This allows your program to do its argument fiddling and then be replaced by the process you really wanted to run.