subprocess.run can execute shell commands directly

I often run shell commands in Python via the subprocess.run command. One thing that has always bugged me is that this required you to split commands into a list before it’d work properly. For example, you’d have to do:

import subprocess
import shlex

subprocess.run(*shlex.split("ls -l"))

Today I discovered that you don’t have to do this! There’s a shell= keyword that can be used to tell subprocess to simply run the command directly in the shell.

For example:

import subprocess
subprocess.run("ls -l", shell=True)

Apparently there are some security considerations but this seems like a big papercut saver to me.

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