title: How to use gcloud commands programmatically via Python
body: <p>The Google documentation is a little generic on this topic and I find it hard to get around the different APIs and terms they're using, so I'm wondering if someone could point me to the right direction.</p>
  
  <p>I'm looking for a way to call the <code>gcloud</code> command directly from Python. I've installed <code>gcloud</code> in my Python environment and as an example to follow, I'd like to know how to do the following from Python:</p>
  
  <pre><code>gcloud compute copy-files [Source directory or file name] [destination directory of file name]
  </code></pre>