Running systemctl in Python script

I'm trying to get the status of a few systemd services in Python, but I keep getting the error FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'systemctl show -p ActiveState --value abc'

I'm running Ubuntu 20.04, as the user user. The abc.service file is in /etc/systemd/system/, details below:

-rw-rw-r-- 1 root root 1542 Aug 5 17:31 abc.service

The script is

import subprocess
status = subprocess.check_output("systemctl show -p ActiveState --value abc")
print(status)

However, if I run the systemctl command directly, I can get the status active. I've tried with sudo in the script, and I get the same error.

On a related note, I thought I would have to run the command using sudo eventually, but I'm actually running the command as part of my Airflow dag (i.e. not as a separate script where I can do sudo python3 myscript.py). Is there a way to do this?

1 Answer

I was careless, and did not include shell=True in my subprocess. Once I added it, it runs successfully.

status = subprocess.check_output("systemctl show -p ActiveState --value abc", shell=True)