On May 19, 10:28 pm, Ben Finney <ben+pyt... at benfinney.id.au> wrote: > Better is to use ‘shlex.split’ to split the string as a shell parser > would do <URL:http://docs.python.org/library/shlex#shlex.split>. Good point. I always forget about shlex.split because I'm usually passing (relatively) constant strings with no funny quoting. Regards, Pat