New submission from Jan Studený:
According to POSIX specification the pathname of user shell is stored in SHELL
(environmental variable, see
http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_chap08.html#tag_08)
so I think that is good idea to use that pathname instead of hardcoded on
R. David Murray added the comment:
Thanks for the suggestion, but that would make programs using subprocess
non-portable. There is an open issue to use the *default* shell instead of
hard coding it (because the sh-alike is not at /bin/sh on, eg, Android), but
using the user shell would break
eryksun added the comment:
I expect Popen's shell=True option to use the same shell as os.system. The
POSIX spec for the [system function][1] requires running sh, as follows:
execl(, "sh", "-c", command, (char *)0);
glibc uses "/bin/sh" for the shell path. Modifying the SHELL environment
eryksun added the comment:
Here's the rationale given for ignoring SHELL in POSIX system():
One reviewer suggested that an implementation of system() might
want to use an environment variable such as SHELL to determine
which command interpreter to use. The supposed implementation
