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Agreed. FWIW the call to list2cmdline seems to compound the problem, since it just takes args and puts double quotes around it, mostly undoing the work of list2cmdline. For example if I use (args=\['a', 'b c'\], shell=True) I think list2cmdline turns that to args='a "b c"', and then the format() expression constructs the command:

cmd.exe /c "a "b c""

I really have no idea what that means on Windows (and no quick access to a Windows box to try it) but on Windows that would create \*two\* arguments, the first one being 'a b' and the second one 'c'.

At this point I can understand that Christian recommends against shell=True -- it's totally messed up! But the fix should really be to fix this, not inventing a new feature.