I have written a script that checks if an SVN Repo is up and running, the result is based on the return value. import subprocess url = " validurl" def check_svn_status(): subprocess.call(['svn info'+url],shell=True) def get_status(): subprocess.call('echo $?',shell=True) def main(): check_svn_status() get_status() if __name__ == '__main__': main() The problem I'm facing is that if I change the url to something that does't exist I still get the return value as 0, but if I were to run this outside the script, i.e go to the terminal type svn info wrong url and then do a echo $? I get a return value of 1. But I can't re-create this in the python. Any guidelines ?