title: What's the best way to execute PowerShell scripts from Python
body: <p>All the previous posts on this topic deal with specific challenges for their use case. I thought it would be useful to have a post only dealing with the cleanest way to run PowerShell scripts from Python and ask if anyone has an better solution than what I found. </p>
  
  <p>What seems to be the generally accepted solution to get around PowerShell trying to interpret different control characters in your command differently to what's intended is to feed your Powershell command in using a file:</p>
  
  <pre><code>ps = 'powershell.exe -noprofile'
  pscommand = 'Invoke-Command -ComputerName serverx -ScriptBlock {cmd.exe \
  /c "dir /b C:\}'
  psfile = open(pscmdfile.ps1, 'w')
  psfile.write(pscommand)
  psfile.close()
  full_command_string = ps + ' pscmdfile.ps1'
  process = subprocess.Popen(full_command_string , shell=True, \
  stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>When your python code needs to change the parameters for the Powershell command each time you invoke it you end up writing and deleting a lot of temporary files for subprocess.Popen to run. It works perfectly but it's unnecessary and not very clean. It's really nice to be able to tidy up and wanted to get suggestions on any improvements I could make to the solution I found.</p>
  
  <p>Instead of writing a file to disk containing the PS command create a virtual file using the io module. Assuming that the "date" and "server" strings are being fed in as part of a loop or function that contains this code, not including the imports of course:</p>
  
  <pre><code>import subprocess
  import io
  from string import Template
  raw_shellcmd = 'powershell.exe -noprofile '
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>--start of loop with server and date variables populated--</p>
  
  <pre><code>raw_pslistcmd = r'Invoke-Command -ComputerName $server -ScriptBlock ' \
          r'{cmd.exe /c "dir /b C:\folder\$date"}'
  
  pslistcmd_template = Template(raw_pslistcmd)
  pslistcmd = pslistcmd_template.substitute(server=server, date=date)
  virtualfilepslistcommand = io.BytesIO(pslistcmd)
  shellcmd = raw_shellcmd + virtualfilepslistcommand.read()
  
  process = subprocess.Popen(shellcmd, shell=True, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, \
  stderr=subprocess.PIPE)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>--end of loop--</p>