[Python-Dev] subprocess insufficiently platform-independent?

[James Y Knight]

On Aug 25, 2008, at 9:52 PM, Greg Ewing wrote:

> Guido van Rossum wrote:
>
>> If you call:
>>    subprocess.call(cmd, shell=False)
>> Then it works on Linux, but fails on Windows because it does not
>> perform the Windows %PATHEXT% search that allows it to find that
>> "svn.exe" is the actual executable to be invoked.
>
> Maybe the Windows implementation should do its own
> %PATHEXT% lookup when the shell is not being used.

+1 to that.

It's really nice to be able to *not* invoke a shell, and thus not have  
to worry about the shell doing nasty things to your process spawning.  
So, any solution that aids portability to windows without requiring  
the invocation of a shell seems like a good thing to me.

James