Aliases are defined and interpreted by the shell. However, when using Python's subprocess module, the shell is typically executed non-interactively, meaning that alias files like .profile or .bashrc won't be read, making aliases unavailable within the subprocess call.
To execute an alias within a subprocess.call call, you can set the shell keyword to True, as seen below:
subprocess.call("myAlias", shell=True)
This informs Python to execute the command through the shell, enabling access to shell features like filename wildcards, shell pipes, and environment variable expansion. However, it's important to note that the shell (/bin/sh) used by subprocess is non-interactive by default, preventing it from reading alias definitions from startup files.
To address this, you can use the $ENV environment variable to force the shell to read the alias file:
subprocess.call("myAlias", shell=True, env=dict(ENV='/path/to/aliasfile'))