Thank you for your reply. I think I'll use PyWin32 if it's available on the user's system, and otherwise fall back to using subprocess.Popen, since I want my script to be cross-platform. os.startfile won't work for me because you can't pass arguments to the file being started. (When I first asked my question, I was thinking I might just need to pass a certain STARTUPINFO flag to subprocess.Popen, but it looks like that's not the solution.)
A few examples from the interactive interpreter should help to explain why I am doing the "\ \\ dance" (I used raw strings in these examples so that I wouldn't need to escape the backslashes): >>> import shlex >>> shlex.split(r'C:\Users\Timothy\Documents\Python\myscript.py') ['C:UsersTimothyDocumentsPythonmyscript.py'] >>> shlex.split(r'C:\\Users\\Timothy\\Documents\\Python\\myscript.py') ['C:\\Users\\Timothy\\Documents\\Python\\myscript.py'] >>> shlex.split(r'C:\Users\Timothy\Documents\Python\myscript.py', posix=False) ['C:\\Users\\Timothy\\Documents\\Python\\myscript.py'] The first example shows that single backslashes get removed. The second example shows that double backslashes are preserved intact. The third example shows that if posix=False, single backslashes are converted to double backslashes. None of these three behaviors are acceptable to correctly parse a Windows path, which is why I am doing what I am to work around the issue. -- Timothy -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
