> yeah sure subprocess.check_output()

It's deprecated and does something quite different.

> If you ever dealt with much perl you know how much more pleasant and easy launching processes was in that language - like shell.

I'm sure it is, but you're missing my point.

> If you want to use that as evidence that I'm a garbage developer go ahead

Well that escalated quickly.

> open(SRC, "output_generator|");

> open(WC, "|wc -l);

>

> And you do whatever you want with those filehandles.

Again python does roughly the same, just with more overhead: a trailing pipe is an "stdout=PIPE", an input is a "input=<whatever>", and you access / forward stdout explicitly:

    src = Popen('output_generator', stdout=PIPE)
    wc = Popen(['wc', '-l'], input=src.stdout)

And as the sibling notes, for shell replacements you can use the sh library to lower the syntactic overhead of popen.