The subprocess.Popen function reorganises the command line for process
creation when shell=True is passed in under Windows. It runs the
existing executable & arguments as arguments to %COMSPEC% /c. However
this fails when a second parameter (typically a filename) has an
embedded space. The patch attached adds extra parameters in this case
and adds appropriate unit tests.

Frankly I'm new to unittests and I more-or-less cloned an existing one
to make this work. Happy to be corrected if there's things done wrong &c.

You aren't testing the modified code, the Popen call should say 
shell=True.

I think that a more PEP8-compliant style would be nice (removing the 
spaces after open and read, and using consistent indentation)

Gabriel Genellina wrote:
> Gabriel Genellina <gagsl-py2@yahoo.com.ar> added the comment:
> 
> You aren't testing the modified code, the Popen call should say 
> shell=True.
> 
> I think that a more PEP8-compliant style would be nice (removing the 
> spaces after open and read, and using consistent indentation)

D'oh. Thanks, Gabriel. I'll rework the test and tidy
up the patch.

Updated patch against r61514. Test code now PEP8-compliant (I hope). New
tests cover spaces in command and parameter with and without shell=True,
both as simple command string and as list of command/args.

An up-to-date patch; same contents, but this one can be cleanly 
applied to trunk (as of r76294)

This is closely related to http://bugs.python.org/issue6689

@Tim: @Gabriel: test_subprocess has changed a lot since the patch was done.  If one of you could provide a new patch for 2.7 and py3k I'll test it, thanks.

Committed as r83830, r83831, r83832

Reverted because of test-breakage on unixes.

ReComitted as r83947, r83956, r83957 and this time the buildbots look happy. (At least as regards this change).

Is there any way to write code that's safe with or without this fix? If I have code that currently does this:

subprocess.check_call('""c:\some path with spaces" arg1 arg2 "a quoted arg""', shell=True)

...will it break when running on a version of Python with this fix? Is there any good way to detect whether the running Python has this fix or not?