I heard that there was an undocumented feature to the
os.popen family, where instead of passing a command
string as the first argument you could pass a list, as
[path, arg1, arg2, ...], and circumvent any shell
interpretation.  I was disapointed to see that this was
not so ("popen() argument 1 must be string, not list"
ditto tuple)

I believe this would be an excellent feature -- using
the shell is a significant source of errors due to
quoting, as well as a serious security concern.  95% of
the time the shell is not required.  The shell also
introduces portability concerns (e.g., bug #512433) --
creating a Python shell is not necessary when the shell
is usually superfluous anyway.

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This feature is indeed available in popen2.

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I see you are correct.  It would be nice if this feature was
consistent across all popen*, and was also documented (and
so  also committed to with clear semantics)

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Does this mean that giving a list to popen2 free us from
taking care of the dangerous characters that could be
interprated/escaped by the shell ???

I don't find any documentation about this feature !!!

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popen5 never uses the shell
(http://www.lysator.liu.se/~astrand/popen5/)

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This may not matter enough to resolve now, with the advent
of the subprocess module.

I agree this isn't required in popen since you can do it with the subprocess module.  Closing.