should these be fixed for python 2.4?

[Jeff Shannon]

Alexander Schmolck wrote:

>I think who got it righter depends the respective ratios of buggy code; I'd be
>not be surprised if only a fraction of python code that simply attempts to run
>an external command with certain arguments (and no shell preprocessing) worked
>correctly.
>
>I appreciate your point but I suspect that at the moment many people are
>extremely likely to do the wrong thing, because it's much more obvious than
>the right thing.
>  
>

Personally, I suspect that the number of people who're running external 
commands that are complex enough for these escaping issues to matter is 
rather small.  The vast majority of uses of os.system() (IMHO) are very 
simple cases with one or two simple arguments.  Relatively few of them 
involve filenames that contain spaces, or other things that might cause 
problems with the naive os.system('cmd %s %s' % (arg1, arg2)) sort of 
approach.

At least, *I've* never personally found myself in a situation where I 
wanted to execute an external command, and in which I needed to worry 
about escaping/quoting the command string.  It's an open question 
whether your experience is more typical than mine, I guess...

Jeff Shannon
Technician/Programmer
Credit International