Subprocess changing directory

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What your code tries to do is call a program named cd ... What you want is call a command named cd.

But cd is a shell internal. So you can only call it as

subprocess.call('cd ..', shell=True) # pointless code! See text below.

But it is pointless to do so. As no process can change another process’s working directory (again, at least on a UNIX-like OS, but as well on Windows), this call will have the subshell change its dir and exit immediately.

What you want can be achieved with os.chdir() or with the subprocess named parameter cwd which changes the working directory immediately before executing a subprocess.

For example, to execute ls in the root directory, you either can do

wd = os.getcwd()
os.chdir("https://stackoverflow.com/")
subprocess.Popen("ls")
os.chdir(wd)

or simply

subprocess.Popen("ls", cwd="https://stackoverflow.com/")

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