The reason that os.popen() doesn't work from within PythonWin is due to a bug in Microsoft's C Runtime Library (CRT). The CRT assumes you have a Win32 console attached to the process.

You should use the win32pipe module's popen() instead which doesn't depend on having an attached Win32 console.

Example:

import win32pipe
f = win32pipe.popen('dir /c c:\\')
print f.readlines()
f.close()

CATEGORY: windows