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

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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