It is not so easy. The problem is that we have to determine the print command by configuration line. A user may wish to change these settings, and some users already changed them. The patch should not break them. For backward compatibility we also have to run a command with a shell, not directly. A method of quoting of command arguments varies in the different systems and it differs from Python's repr. The new code should work in case if the user has not changed the default settings, and in case he changed them (for example when he replaced %%s to "%%s"). Definitely, this is not an easy issue.