[Python-Dev] popen behavior

[Kevin Butler]

I've done some work implementing popen* for Jython, and had a couple of questions:

- Should we maintain the os.popen & popen2.popen dual exposure with their 
different argument & return value orders?

The 'os' exposure is newer, so I assume it is preferred.  The calls follow 
these patterns:
	stdin, stdout, stderr = os.popen*( command, mode, bufsize )
	stdout, stdin, stderr = popen2.popen*( command, bufsize, mode )

- Should we maintain the different behavior for lists of arguments vs strings? 
(it does not appear to be documented)

That is, the command can be either a string or a list of strings.  If it is a 
list of strings, it is executed as a new process without a shell. If it is a 
string, CPython's popen2 module attempts to execute it as a shell command-line 
as follows:
         if isinstance(cmd, types.StringTypes):
             cmd = ['/bin/sh', '-c', cmd]

Thanks

kb