On Sun, 16 Sep 2012 12:40:18 +0200, Hans Mulder wrote: > But you should get into the habit of using shell=False whenever > possible, because it is much easier to get it right.
More accurately, you should get into the habit of passing a list as the first argument, rather than a string. On Unix-like systems (including Mac OS X), this effectively requires shell=False. Passing a list with shell=True has behaviour which is well-defined, but rarely useful (the first element of the list will be executed as a shell command, the remaining elements will be available via the shell variables $1, $2, etc within that command). On Windows, the list is converted to a command string using the same quoting rules regardless of the value of the shell= parameter. The difference is that shell=False requires the "executable" to actually be a binary executable, while shell=True allows it to be some other type of file (e.g. a batch file, Python script, etc). -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
