Understanding python subprocess.check_output’s first argument and shell=True [duplicate]

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From the documentation of Popen:

The shell argument (which defaults to False) specifies whether to use
the shell as the program to execute. If shell is True, it is
recommended to pass args as a string rather than as a sequence.

On Unix with shell=True, the shell defaults to /bin/sh. If args is a
string, the string specifies the command to execute through the shell.
This means that the string must be formatted exactly as it would be
when typed at the shell prompt. This includes, for example, quoting or
backslash escaping filenames with spaces in them. If args is a
sequence, the first item specifies the command string, and any
additional items will be treated as additional arguments to the shell
itself. That is to say, Popen does the equivalent of:

Popen(['/bin/sh', '-c', args[0], args[1], ...])

On Windows with shell=True, the COMSPEC environment variable specifies
the default shell. The only time you need to specify shell=True on
Windows is when the command you wish to execute is built into the
shell (e.g. dir or copy). You do not need shell=True to run a batch
file or console-based executable.

In your case, since echo is a shell built-in when launched with shell=True, if you want to pass arguments to the echo command you must either write the command as a string or pass a sequence that has the whole command as a string as first element. Other elements of the sequence are passed as arguments to the shell, not to the command you are invoking.

In some OSes echo is also a program (usually /bin/echo). This explains why your first example didn’t raise an exception but outputs '\n' instead of the expected 'Hello, World!\n': the /bin/echo command was executed without arguments, because the argument was “consumed” by the shell.

The error raised when calling:

subprocess.check_output("echo Hello World!")

is due to the fact that, since you did not use shell=True, python is trying to execute the program echo Hello World! i.e. a program that has the name echo<space>Hello<space>World!. It is a valid program name, but you there’s no program with that name, hence the exception.

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