PEP idea: On Windows, subprocess should implicitly support .bat and .cmd scripts by using FindExecutable from win32 API

[Chris Angelico]

On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 10:58 AM, Dave Angel <davea at davea.name> wrote:
> There's nothing Windows-specific about that behaviour.  In Linux, there are
> bash commands that can only be run by using shell=True.  Fortunately Popen
> didn't make the mistake of pretending it's a shell.

But bash commands aren't the same as shell scripts. For instance, if
you want to enumerate bash aliases, you can't exec() to the 'alias'
command, because there isn't one. But shell scripts *can* be exec'd:

$ grep $ exec_demo.*
exec_demo.c:#include <stdio.h>
exec_demo.c:#include <unistd.h>
exec_demo.c:int main()
exec_demo.c:{
exec_demo.c: printf("This part is coming from C code.\n");
exec_demo.c: int err=execl("./exec_demo.sh", 0);
exec_demo.c: printf("exec() failed! %d\n",err);
exec_demo.c:}
exec_demo.sh:#!/bin/sh
exec_demo.sh:echo This part ran from the shell.
exec_demo.sh:echo Hello, world!
$ ./a.out
This part is coming from C code.
This part ran from the shell.
Hello, world!
$ pike -e 'Process.exec("./exec_demo.sh");'
This part ran from the shell.
Hello, world!
$ python -c 'import subprocess; subprocess.call(["./exec_demo.sh"])'
This part ran from the shell.
Hello, world!
(Python doesn't seem to have any way to 'exec', but a subprocess comes
to the same thing.)

I don't know about Windows, but it seems reasonable to be able to be
able to run many types of program equally, including batch files. But
maybe Windows is just weak that way.

ChrisA