[Python-Dev] test_popen broken on Win2K

[Tim Peters]

[Greg Ewing]
> What we need is a function which does all those things,
> but uses some way of specifying them *other* than shell
> metacharacters. E.g.
>
>   os.plumb(("sed", "-e", "s/dead/resting/", "parrots"),
>     ("grep", "norwegian"), output = myfile))

[Jeff Epler]
> +1 on the concept.  +1 on something that can be transformed to use tcl's
> "exec" so that it'll begin working on several common arches immediately.

They're really the same thing -- Tcl's exec would be a simple transformation
of a cross-platform sh-like syntax into Greg's hypothesized functions.  The
pain in Tcl's exec implementation was in providing the functionality across
platforms, not in parsing the sh-like syntax.  Then again, Tcl was trying to
run all the way back to Windows 3.1, and Python already gave up on that.