uniicode and executing a process with subprocess.call, or os.system

[MRAB]

Rick King wrote:
> Hello,
> I want to copy files using subprocess.call or os.system where the file 
> names are non-ascii, e.g. Serbian(latin), c's and s's with hacheks,etc. 
> Windows stores all the file names in unicode so they are displayed ok in 
> explorer, and I can read them into my program with listdir(u'.'), etc. 
> and work with the names in the program.
> 
> os.rename()
> 
> can be used to rename such files successfully.
> 
> But I want to be able to copy files using:
> 
> cmdstr = u'copy' +u' /Y "'+pair[0]+u'" "'+pair[1]+u'"\n'
> cmdstr = cmdstr.encode(sys.getfilesystemencoding())
> try: retcode = sp.call(cmdstr, shell=True) #SP=SUBPROCESS
> 
> but the encoding can't handle all the characters and so the file isn't 
> found to be copied. sp.call() returns 1. 'mbcs' encoding doesn't work 
> either. 'utf-8' doesn't work.
> 
> I am very confused about unicode. Can someone point me in the right 
> direction?
> 
> windows xp sp2
> python 2.6.2 unicode
> 
Use the shutil module.