The subprocess module provides some nice tools to control the details of running a process, but it's still rather awkward for common use cases where you want to execute a command in one go. * There are three high-level functions: call, check_call and check_output, which all do very similar things with different return/raise behaviours * Their naming is not very clear (check_output doesn't check the output, it checks the return code and captures the output) * You can't use any of them if you want stdout and stderr separately. * You can get stdout and returncode from check_output, but it's not exactly obvious: try: stdout = check_output(...) returncode = 0 except CalledProcessError as e: stdout = e.output returncode = e.returncode I think that what these are lacking is a good way to represent a process that has already finished (as opposed to Popen, which is mostly designed to handle a running process). So I would: 1. Add a CompletedProcess class: * Attributes stdout and stderr are bytes if the relevant stream was piped, None otherwise, like the return value of Popen.communicate() * Attribute returncode is the exit status * ? Attribute cmd is the list of arguments the process ran with (not sure if this should be there or not) * Method cp.check_returncode() raises CalledProcessError if returncode != 0, inspired by requests' Response.raise_for_status() 2. Add a run() function - like call/check_call/check_output, but returns a CompletedProcess instance 3. Deprecate call/check_call/check_output, but leave them around indefinitely, since lots of existing code relies on them. Thanks, Thomas