Right, and I do that, but it's an obvious hack; it causes a separate sh process to spawn, you open yourself to shell injection issues if you're not careful, teeing the pipe is trickier than it should be, etc etc.

you might have known this but the practice shows that It has to be repeated: there is no shell injection issues with literal string in your own code.

YMMV but for those rare cases when I care about the shell injection, I just don't use shell and run the command directly in Python. Combination of shell one-liners and the main logic in Python works well in practice.

Oh yeah, for sure. I think it's just frustrating having that one more piece of mental overhead. Like, it should be that there's one sane way to do all this stuff in Python. Instead it's literal blobs of shell in some cases, and subprocess.STDXX pipes linked up in other cases, and maybe sometimes you use shlex to sanitize your arguments, or you give up on streaming and just use communicate() to get the whole result in memory at once. Blah.

I don’t see it as an overhead, I see using shell syntax as just another DSL like regex.

There are many different use cases related to running processes—it is natural that different solutions may be preferred for different cases (check_{call,output}, with/out shell, run, Popen, pty/PIPE, threads/Asunción—all may be useful. And it is just stdlib ).