system(...) and unicode

["Martin v. Löwis"]

andrew at acooke.org wrote:
> Hmmm.  After reading
> http://kofoto.rosdahl.net/trac/wiki/UnicodeInPython I tried:
> 
>         system(cmd.encode(getfilesystemencoding()))
> 
> which works (nothing else changed).  But that seems odd - is this a bug
> (the asymmetry - I read files with os.listdir with no explicit unicode
> handling, but need to do something explicitly on output - seems wrong),
> or am I going to be bitten by other errors later?

Whether or not listdir returns a Unicode string depends on whether you
pass a Unicode string as the directory name. So if you change the
directory name to be a byte string, the file name should be a byte
string, too.

And yes, it would be desirable to enhance system() to support Unicode
strings; contributions in that direction are welcome (although one
should then also support exec*(), spawn*(), popen*(), and the subprocess
module).

Regards,
Martin