os.system worked fine, and I found something in another section of code that was causing the "Too many open errors." (I was fooled, because output from subprocess call didn't seem to be coming out until the open files error.
I'll go back and play with subprocess.call more, since os.system works. That's interesting about using shlex at run time. Is that just for the sake of computational cost? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list