I'm kind of surprised to see that the subprocess module doesn't have a documented function for calling to properly quote command-line arguments. Nor does it seem to do so automatically -- at least on Unix.
It *does* have an undocumented function called "list2cmdline" (refered to in passing in the docs as a "method"), which is called automatically if the "args" parameter to the Popen() initializer is a sequence, and the platform is Windows, but not otherwise. No similar quoting of args is done for Unix. On the other hand, the "pipes" module has another undocumented function called "quote", which seems to perform similar quoting, but for sh. "Pipes" is documented to work only under Unix -- which is a bit strange, as cmd.exe supports pipes on Windows as well. Given that Python, even 3, ships with os.system() and os.popen() and subprocess and pipes and perhaps others that I don't know about, exposing a quoting mechanism that appropriately quotes for either sh or cmd.exe, depending on platform, wouldn't be a bad idea. And perhaps pipes should be eliminated, or re-written in terms of subprocess to be cross-platform. Bill _______________________________________________ stdlib-sig mailing list stdlib-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/stdlib-sig
