subprocesscheckcall

Subprocesscheckcall is a term used to describe a function that runs a command in a subprocess and raises an exception if the command fails. In Python, the canonical function is subprocess.check_call, which is part of the standard library's subprocess module. check_call executes the program described by args and waits for it to finish. If the process exits with a zero return code, the function returns without a value. If the exit code is non-zero, it raises subprocess.CalledProcessError, including the returncode and the command that was executed. This makes error handling straightforward in scripts that require a successful external command.

Parameters typically include: args (a sequence of program arguments or a string when shell=True), stdin, stdout, and stderr to redirect streams, shell to control shell usage, cwd to set the working directory, env to provide environment variables, and timeout to bound execution time. By default, stdout and stderr are inherited, so the output appears in the calling process unless redirected.

Common usage examples: subprocess.check_call(['mkdir','-p','dir']) on Unix-like systems, or subprocess.check_call('echo hi', shell=True). For capturing output, check_call is not suitable; use check_output or, more generally, subprocess.run with check=True. The run function returns a CompletedProcess object and can capture stdout with capture_output.

Related functions: subprocess.run, subprocess.check_output, subprocess.CalledProcessError. If you encounter a symbol named subprocesscheckcall, it is likely a reference or alias for subprocess.check_call in code, not a distinct standard function.