I have a collection of expert advisor (EA) scripts written in the MQL5 programming language for the stock/forex trading platform, MetaTrader5. The extension of these files is mq5. I am looking for a way to programatically run these MQL5 files from my Python script on a regular basis. The EAs do some price transformations, eventually saving a set of csv files that will later be read by my Python script to apply Machine Learning models on them.
My first natural choice was the Python API for MetaTrader5. However, according to its documentation, it "is designed for convenient and fast obtaining of exchange data via interprocessor communication directly from the MetaTrader 5 terminal" and as such, it doesn't provide the functionality I need to be able to run MQL scripts using Python.
I have found some posts here on SO (such as #1, #2) about executing non-python files using Python but those posts seemed to always come with the precondition that they already had Python code written in them, only the extension differed - this is different from my goal.
I then came across Python's subprocess module and started experimenting with that.
print(os.path.isfile(os.path.join("path/to/dir","RSIcalc.mq5")))
with open(os.path.join("path/to/dir","RSIcalc.mq5")) as f:
subprocess.run([r"C:\Program Files\MetaTrader 5\terminal64.exe", f], capture_output=True)
The print statement returns True, so the mq5 file exists in the specified location. Then the code opens the MetaTrader5 terminal but nothing else happens, the EA doesn't get executed, process finishes immediately after that.
Am I even on the right track for what I'm trying to achieve here? If yes, what might be the solution for me to run these MQL5 scripts programatically from Python?
Edit:
I use Windows 10 64-bit.
subprocess is indeed the right module for what you want to achieve. But let's look at what you're doing here:
with open(os.path.join("path/to/dir","RSIcalc.mq5")) as f
You're creating a file descriptor handle called f, which is used to write or read contents from a file. If you do print(f) you'll see that it's a python object, that converted to string looks like <_io.TextIOWrapper name='RSIcalc.mq5' mode='r' encoding='UTF-8'>. It is extremely unlikely that such a string is what you want to pass as a command-line parameter to your terminal executable, which is what happens when you include it in your call to subprocess.run().
What you likely want to do is this:
full_path = os.path.abspath(os.path.join("path/to/dir","RSIcalc.mq5"))
result = subprocess.run([r"C:\Program Files\MetaTrader 5\terminal64.exe", full_path], capture_output=True)
Now, this assumes your terminal64 can execute arbitrary scripts passed as parameters. This may or may not be true - you might need extra parameters like "-f" before passing the file path, or you might have to feed script contents through the stdin pipe (unlikely, on Windows, but who knows). That's for you to figure out, but my code above should probably be your starting point.
I don’t think you need to be passing a file object to your sub process statement. In my experience. A program will run a file when the path to the file is provided as a command line argument. Try this:
subprocess.run([r"C:\\Program Files\\MetaTrader 5\\terminal64.exe", os.path.join(“path/to/dir”, “RSIcalc.mq5”], capture_output=True)
This is the same as typing C:\Program Files\MetaTrader 5\terminal64.exe path\to\dir\RSIcalc.mq5 in your terminal.
Related
I'm trying to restrict write and read access to a Python file. Suppose I have the following code:
with open('test.py', 'w+') as file:
file.write('''
open("document.txt", "w+").write("Hello, World!")
open("document.txt", "r+").read()
''')
By executing this code, a new file is created that in the new file there are two lines of code to write and read a another file.
I want the file created by executing this code (test.py) to hit PermissionError while running and not be able to create a new file or read it; Also, this file is only executable and normal commands work in it, but it can not access other files.
If I read you correctly, this is not a python problem, but an environment problem. I understand the question as something like 'how do I prevent python code from executing arbitrary reads or writes?'. There would be a trivial solution (modifying the generated test.py so it throws an error) but presumably that's not what you want.
The easiest way to make python hit a PermissionError... is to make sure it doesn't have permissions. So run your code as a user with extremely limited permissions---specifically no write permissions anywhere---or perhaps no default permissions at all, and use something like facls to grant permission to read specific files explicitly from a more priveleged sentinel process. (This assumes you are running Linux, but there are likely other ways to do this in different OSs).
Alternatively, look into various sandboxing techniques to give you a python interpreter with the relavent modules replaced with modules which throw errors, or an environment where outside modification is impossible.
It would help if you made it clearer why this is important, and why you are writing a python script with another python script (is this just an example of malicious action?).
You could technically change the permission of the file itself on the filesystem your trying to access.
Check the previous thread about changing permissions
os.chmod(path, <permission value>)
Where 000 is to disable anyone other than root to edit on linux.
I want to access DOORS content using python.
I have read this answer , but it did not give clear instructions.
The general information you can get from the link is: "there is no direct way to get information about DOORS content using Python". The only reliable way to get information from DOORS is by writing and starting a DXL script.
You might want to start this DXL script from "outside", e.g. using Python and after it is finished you can get the result from that script.
This post sums it up quite well: Rational Doors 9.6 interfacing with C#
(C# is interchangeable with any other language here).
Your python program will possibly contain something like
import subprocess
subprocess.call([r'C:\Program Files\ibm\Rational\DOORS\9.6\bin\doors.exe', '-dxl', r'C:\Users\Hazem\Desktop\DOORSScript\Doors2xml.dxl', '-user', 'Hazem', '-password', 'test'])
While your DXL file might create e.g. an .XML or .CSV file at a predefined location and then your script will read the content of this file and do whatever you want to do with it (you could also catch the script's STDOUT, but that ususally brings more problems).
You can pass parameters to a DXL script using environment variables, in DXL there is a perm string getenv (string var) to get these.
First of all, I am new to coding, and I have looked for similar questions and I know some commands which can be used in Python and in CMD to open a file using an executable. The problem I'm having is that when I try to use those commands, the program runs without any error, but it doesn't give the output file that should give. On the other hand, when I just double click the file, which is set to open with *.exe, it works and produces the output.
I tried the CMD command:
start "path of .exe" "filepath"
also just:
"path of .exe" "filepath"
Then I tried the os and subprocess modules in python:
subprocess.Popen(...)
os.system(...)
subprocess.run(...)
and many other solution I found on the internet. The point is that all of these solution don't give errors and should work, but they don't produce the wanted file for me. I used the same commands on another file with a different .exe and they work.
This is the step that is not working in my attempt to automate a whole process. If someone is willing to take a look at the files, you can download them from the following link:
https://gofile.io/?c=5TJtS9
The files are as follows:
1. running the rdam.grd file with hist_dam2d.exe produces the hist.plotps file
2. then running the hist.plotps with plotps.exe produces the wanted diagram
It should be an easy task that doesn't work for me.
For more information... This is part a random finite element software which is freely distributed by the authors. You can see the whole documentation and download all parts of the program from this link:
http://random.engmath.dal.ca/rfem/
The parts that are causing the problem are used just for extracting and showing results.
It is an old software so maybe there is some problem with that.
I don't know what exactly you did with your Python code since you didn't provide the exact code snippets. I also don't have the reputation to comment. So I'll just provide code examples for the 3 methods you listed (CMD, Powershell, Python). All three methods worked on my machine.
1) CMD
start "" "plotps.exe" hist.plotps
The double quotes after the start keyword are there to specify an optional title. What went wrong in your CMD example is that windows thought "plotps.exe" was the title. You don't need to specify a title, but you need to write the quotes. More info on this keyword can be found here: https://ss64.com/nt/start.html
Also note that start is asynchronous
A synchronous way of doing it would be:
plotps.exe hist.plotps
2) Powershell
Start-Process -FilePath "plotps.exe" -ArgumentList "hist.plotps"
I would strongly recommend using powershell over CMD if you have access to both.
This method is synchronous.
More info on Start-Process: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/Microsoft.PowerShell.Management/Start-Process?view=powershell-5.0
3) Python
I'm not a python expert but this worked for me:
import subprocess
subprocess.call(['plotps.exe', 'hist.plotps'])
My question is somewhat unique. I am currently working on a project for my computer forensics class. This project is aimed at hiding disk data from investigators. The method by which this is supposed to be achieved is by writing the bytes of a "clean" file over the "bad" file. Once overwritten, the "bad" file is deleted.
This concept sounds simple enough, but what my partner and I have observed is interesting. If we open a file in a python script, we can easily overwrite the memory associated with that file on disk (verified using dd). We can also easily delete a file using from inside the script. However, a write then delete results in no write actually taking place, only the file's removal.
This makes sense from an OS optimization standpoint. From that point, we thought it might work if we split the writing and deleting into two separate scripts, and controlled both by a third. However, it seems that even if we run the scripts as a subprocess of another script, the same thing happens. We've tried to use bash scripts for the deletion process instead of pure python, and still, nothing sticks.
This project was supposed to be a whole mess of little anti-forensics tools like this, but this particular one has captured our whole attention because of this issue. Does anyone have an idea as to why this is happening and what we can do to move forward?
We know this can be achieved in C, etc, but we want to solve this using python because of the interesting constraints it's presented.
---EDIT---
This is a snippet from our controller, it calls "ghost.py" with the associated params.
ghost.py prints the edited file names/paths to stdout.
Relevant code follows:
proc = subprocess.Popen(['python', 'ghost.py', '-c', 'good.txt', '-d','/mnt/evil.txt'], stdout=subprocess.PIPE,)
files = proc.communicate()
for i in files:
if i != None and i != "\n":
os.system("./del.sh " + i)
Using a subprocess doesn't change any interesting aspect of your design, so don't use them. You probably need os.fsync(). Try this pattern:
myfile.write('all of my good data')
myfile.flush()
os.fsync(myfile.fileno())
myfile.close()
os.remove(myfile)
Reference: https://docs.python.org/2/library/os.html#os.fsync
I want to automate the entire process of creating ngs,bit and mcs files in xilinx and have these files be automatically be associated with certain folders in the svn repository. What I need to know is that is there a log file that gets created in the back end of the Xilinx gui which records all the commands I run e.g open project,load file,synthesize etc.
Also the other part that I have not been able to find is a log file that records the entire process of synthesis, map,place and route and generate programming file. Specially record any errors that the tool encountered during these processes.
If any of you can point me to such files if they exist it would be great. I haven't gotten much out of my search but maybe I didn't look enough.
Thanks!
Well, it is definitely a nice project idea but a good amount of work. There's always a reason why an IDE was built – a simple search yields the "Command Line Tools User Guide" for various versions of Xilinx ISE, like for 14.3, 380 pages about
Overview and list of features
Input and output files
Command line syntax and options
Report and message information
ISE is a GUI for various command line executables, most of them are located in the subfolder 14.5/ISE_DS/ISE/bin/lin/ (in this case: Linux executables for version 14.5) of your ISE installation root. You can review your current parameters for each action by right clicking the item in the process tree and selecting "Process properties".
On the Python side, consider using the subprocess module:
The subprocess module allows you to spawn new processes, connect to their input/output/error pipes, and obtain their return codes.
Is this the entry point you were looking for?
As phineas said, what you are trying to do is quite an undertaking.
I've been there done that, and there are countless challenges along the way. For example, if you want to move generated files to specific folders, how do you classify these files in order to figure out which files are which? I've created a project called X-MimeTypes that attempts to classify the files, but you then need a tool to parse the EDA mime type database and use that to determine which files are which.
However there is hope, so to answer the two main questions you've pointed out:
To be able to automatically move generated files to predetermined paths. From what you are saying it seems like you want to do this to make the versioning process easier? There is already a tool that does this for you based on "design structures" that you create and that can be shared within a team. The tool is called Scineric Workspace so check it out. It also have built in Git and SVN support which ignores things according to the design structure and in most cases it filters all generated things by vendor tools without you having to worry about it.
You are looking for a log file that shows all commands that were run. As phineas said, you can check out the Command Line Tools User guides for ISE, but be aware that the commands to run have changed again in Vivado. The log file of each process also usually states the exact command with its parameters that have been called. This should be close to the top of the report. If you look for one log file that contains everything, that does not exist. Again, Scineric Workspace supports evoking flows from major vendors (ISE, Vivado, Quartus) and it produces one log file for all processes together while still allowing each process to also create its own log file. Errors, warning etc. are also marked properly in this big report. Scineric has a tcl shell mode as well, so your python tool can run it in the background and parse the complete log file it creates.
If you have more questions on the above, I will be happy to help.
Hope this helps,
Jaco