without shell

[Donn Cave]

In article <11aj9d3fga9or8b at corp.supernews.com>,
 Grant Edwards <grante at visi.com> wrote:

> On 2005-06-10, Mage <mage at mage.hu> wrote:
> 
> >>py> file_list = os.popen("ls").read()
> >>
> >>Stores the output of ls into file_list.
> >>
> > These commands invoke shell indeed.
> 
> Under Unix, popen will not invoke a shell if it's passed a
> sequence rather than a single string.

I suspect you're thinking of the popen2 functions.
On UNIX, os.popen is posix.popen, is a simple wrapper
around the C library popen.  It always invokes the
shell.

The no-shell alternatives are spawnv (instead of
system) and the popen2 family (given a sequence
of strings.)

   Donn Cave, donn at u.washington.edu