Previous to 3.2, os.popen was made a context manager thanks to a private helper, os._wrap_close (contextlib.closing was maybe unavailable due to a bootstrapping issue). Now that subprocess.Popen directly implements the context manager protocol, this could be cleaned up.
I'm pretty sure that the os._wrap_close wrapper is not the same thing as the Popen context manager. I don't think it's useful to try refactor this. As Antoine points out, the current wrapper serves a very different purpose.
Mark: if you know Python you can answer that question yourself by reading the code of the subprocess and os modules. From a fairly short glance at the code I'd say that _wrap_close is not obsolete. It is a wrapper about a file object for the stdout or stdin stream of a Popen object (depending on the last argument of os.popen), and when _wrap_close.close is called it closes the wrapped stream, then waits for the subprocess to die and returns a *transformation* of the exitcode attribute. If my interpretation of the _wrap_close is correct this issue can be closed as invalid (the code cannot be cleaned up without changing functionality)
