[Python-Dev] subprocess shell=True on Windows doesn't escape ^ character (original) (raw)

Nikolaus Rath Nikolaus at rath.org
Fri Jun 13 04:11:07 CEST 2014

"R. David Murray" <rdmurray at bitdance.com> writes:

Also notice that using a list with shell=True is using the API incorrectly. It wouldn't even work on Linux, so that torpedoes the cross-platform concern already :)

This kind of confusion is why I opened http://bugs.python.org/issue7839.

Can someone describe an use case where shell=True actually makes sense at all?

It seems to me that whenever you need a shell, the argument's that you pass to it will be shell specific. So instead of e.g.

Popen('for i in seq 42; do echo $i; done', shell=True)

you almost certainly want to do

Popen(['/bin/sh', 'for i in seq 42; do echo $i; done'], shell=False)

because if your shell happens to be tcsh or cmd.exe, things are going to break.

Best, -Nikolaus

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