Forum Discussion

John_Laird's avatar
John_Laird
Contributor
9 years ago

odd behavior with sys.clipboard

My goal is to pipe output from command line GNU DIFF to clipboard and then log it. My problem is that Sys.Clipboard is holding the last thing I copied to clipboard BEFORE running the script. I have v...
  • HKosova's avatar
    HKosova
    9 years ago

    WshShell.Run by default does not wait for the command to complete, so Log.Warning(Sys.Clipboard) happens before diff completes. To make it wait you need to specify True as the third parameter of the Run method.

    WshShell.Run(diffCmd, 0, True)

     

    Alternatively, you can use Python's built-in subprocess.check_output so you won't have to deal with the clipboard:

    import subprocess

    def diffTwoFilesToLog(file1, file2):
      output = subprocess.check_output(["C:\\Program Files (x86)\\GnuWin32\\bin\\diff.exe", file1, file2])
      output = output.decode()  # convert byte-string to string
      Log.Warning(output) 
John_Laird's avatar
John_Laird
Contributor
9 years ago

OK so I worked around the problem by not using the clipboard and getting what I needed via standard output. I changed WshShell.Run to WShShell.Exec, then got the standard output from the object that WshShel.Exec returns.

def diffTwoFilesToLog(file1, file2):
  diffCmd = "\"C:\\Program Files (x86)\\GnuWin32\\bin\\diff.exe\" " + file1 + " " + file2
  execResult = WshShell.Exec(diffCmd)
  sout = execResult.StdOut
  Log.Warning(sout.ReadAll())

I'm still a bit confused why Sys.Clipboard was not working before with the previous example though.