Comment by zekrioca
2 years ago
I agree and disagree. Python’s Subprocess has been the reason for many unfortunate, time-consuming bugs among users who think they are properly executing external commands, but that in end cannot realize their logic are full of errors, with no indication that something went bad.
I agree that a standard interface is always better, however not at the cost of productivity. A better than the current Subprocess interface is needed, and I think plumbum is the direction to go.
I am curious which errors do you find most problematic? We have internal codebase with hundreds of developers, and we haven't observed many subprocess related bugs. And the ability to print command being executed (via shlex.join) so it can be copied to shell and debugged there is very nice.
That said, there is a bunch of rules in our internal style guide about this process, such as: avoid shell=True unless you need shell functionality and know how shell quoting works; use python instead of tools like grep/head/aws/etc.. when performance permits; check returncode after Popen calls; correctly quote ssh args (they are tricky!)