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Avoiding shell metacharacters in os.popen

Nick Craig-Wood nick at craig-wood.com
Thu Sep 30 07:30:14 EDT 2004 
Donn Cave <donn at u.washington.edu> wrote:
>  Well, it sounded to me like the real problem is that Microsoft
>  Windows doesn't support any functional equivalent to spawnv for
>  pipes.  I don't know if that's true or not,

No me neither!

>  I'm just taking it from you that os.popen2 doesn't support a list
>  of parameters [1] on Microsoft Windows platforms,

Well it didn't work when I tried it.

>  and inferring that it doesn't because it can't - there isn't any
>  specific function that does it, and you can't just roll your own
>  out of pipe/fork/execve like you can on UNIX, as in fact popen2
>  does.

It could always do " ".join(cmd) which would leave windows users
exactly where they are at the moment.

I'll probably end up writing a little wrapper to popen2 which does
something like that, possibly with a bit better quoting for windows.

>  If that's really a question and not a well known fact, you
>  might pose it again  with a subject line that would attract
>  more attention from Microsoft Windows developers, since
>  only they would know.  The attempt to cast it as a general
>  Python problem could be counterproductive, if it means the
>  people who read about this problem tend to be those who
>  don't really suffer from it.

Good point.  I'll have a think about it (and a look at the Windows
source of popen2!)

-- 
Nick Craig-Wood <nick at craig-wood.com> -- http://www.craig-wood.com/nick
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