It started to at build 385 or 386.

AMD64 FreeBSD Shared 3.x:
https://buildbot.python.org/all/#/builders/152/builds/391

======================================================================
FAIL: test_specific_shell (test.test_subprocess.POSIXProcessTestCase)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/home/buildbot/python/3.x.koobs-freebsd-564d/build/Lib/test/test_subprocess.py", line 2180, in test_specific_shell
    self.assertEqual(p.stdout.read().strip(), bytes(sh, 'ascii'))
AssertionError: b'' != b'/usr/local/bin/bash'

It looks like an installation issue:

% /usr/local/bin/bash -c ""       
ld-elf.so.1: Shared object "libncurses.so.8" not found, required by "bash"

Updated FreeBSD CURRENT base, which removed libncurses. The bash port installation needed to be rebuilt. 

@Victor Can tests be skipped on the basis of required dependencies failing to load/run?

> @Victor Can tests be skipped on the basis of required dependencies failing to load/run?

No idea how to detect such issue. For me, such installation issue is uncommon and it's easier to fix your system rather than trying to skip the test.

Not suggesting it's the *best* way, but for example, isn't there a way to handle return codes from shell executions such as:

https://docs.python.org/3/library/subprocess.html#subprocess.CalledProcessError

Do you suggest to skip the test if returncode has a specific value?

The current test runs a try/finally without any exception handling, so even minimal exception handling will cover a large swatch of potential issues.

CalledProcessError [1] returned by check_call() or check_output() appears to be handy

[1] https://docs.python.org/3/library/subprocess.html#subprocess.CalledProcessError

AMD64 FreeBSD Shared 3.x is green again, I close the issue.