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From: Nobody <nobody@nowhere.com>
Subject: Re: Moving folders with content
Date: Sun, 16 Sep 2012 15:31:07 +0100
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On Sun, 16 Sep 2012 12:40:18 +0200, Hans Mulder wrote:

> But you should get into the habit of using shell=False whenever
> possible, because it is much easier to get it right.

More accurately, you should get into the habit of passing a list as the
first argument, rather than a string.

On Unix-like systems (including Mac OS X), this effectively requires
shell=False. Passing a list with shell=True has behaviour which is
well-defined, but rarely useful (the first element of the list will be
executed as a shell command, the remaining elements will be available via
the shell variables $1, $2, etc within that command).

On Windows, the list is converted to a command string using the same
quoting rules regardless of the value of the shell= parameter. The
difference is that shell=False requires the "executable" to actually be a
binary executable, while shell=True allows it to be some other type of
file (e.g. a batch file, Python script, etc).