I really like the python sh library for stuff like this. Would you rather do what you wrote, or this?

    for listing in ls('-l'):
        '''etc'''

Here's the library in question - https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pbs - it makes me super happy to do shell work in python.

Wow, that's a neat library. You can just import any program and use it like a function (from sh import grep)! Thanks for the link. Also, sh documentation: http://amoffat.github.io/sh/

Yeah, it's replaced just a ton of boilerplate `def run(*args):` functions wrapping Popen. I couldn't be happier.

i use Sh to interface with my cmus player. from sh import cmus_remote! :)