This is working as designed.  None means read from stdin.  It is already documented in a note under shlex.split, so there isn't a doc issue here either. 

(Aside: 'crash' means segfault, which this isn't.)

You could try to recast this as a feature request, but I think backward compatibility would shoot that down.  You could raise it on python-ideas if you want to, but it is quite likely that *someone* is using this feature, so I don't think it likely we'll want to change it.