Tim Golden wrote: > What I haven't investigated yet is whether the additional flags > your example is passing (shell=True etc.) cause the main Popen > mechanism to take a different path.
Sure enough, passing shell=True -- which is probably quite a rare requirement -- causes the code to change the call from "a.exe b.doc" to '%COMSPEC% /c "a.exe" "b.doc"'. The quoting rules (from cmd /?) are slightly involved but I can't see at first why this shouldn't work. However it clearly doesn't so I'll try to put together either a patch to the subprocess code or to the docs warning of the behaviour. I think that, in general, you need to pass shell=True far less often that you might imagine. (Possibly only for internal commands like dir, copy etc.). TJG -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
