Using C (or C++) to create Python modules is really quite simple, providing you know a little C of course. I recently had to do some work around getting a bunch of legacy C code talking to a newer system and thought I’d post a nice simple example of how the Python extensions work.

This code gives you a single method “do()” that will print the output of a command, passed to it as a string, to stdout and return the exit code as a python int.

Here is a simple way to run something on UNIX / Linux as another user, without having to resort to weird sudo incantations. The Makefile is left as an exercise for the reader.

This has only been tested on FreeBSD, Debian Linux and OpenSolaris so far.