Script to run external commands hidden and capture their output without temporary files

[Leo]

If you want the method that uses a temporary file to capture the output, there's an example here:

Extracting '--help' from a python script

Change the commands at the top as appropriate. (If you need unicode support for the help text, that's possible with a couple of small changes, but would mean you always had to run the command in a particular way, which might not be what you want. I'…

(And a few more around the forum, but that's a self-contained one that's easy to experiment with.)