PEP idea: On Windows, subprocess should implicitly support .bat and .cmd scripts by using FindExecutable from win32 API

[Stefan Zimmermann]

Hi.

I don't like that subprocess.Popen(['command']) only works on Windows if there is a command.exe in %PATH%. As a Windows user you would normally expect that also command.bat and command.cmd can be run that way.

There are simple workarounds like Popen(..., shell=True) but that is a heavy overhead for .exe files.

Currently I use pywin32 and call Popen([win32api.FindExecutable('command')[1]]) as a workaround. This has zero overhead.

It should be default for Popen to call FindExecutable internally.

Was this discussed before?
Is it worth a PEP?
Or at least an issue?

Cheers,
Stefan