What's the difference between subprocess.Popen(“echo $HOME”… and subprocess.Popen([“echo”, “$HOME”]

Question

I cannot get it it\'s bash related or python subprocess, but results are different:

>>> subprocess.Popen(\"echo $HOME\", shell=True, stdout=subproce         


        

Answer 1

When you have shell=True, actual process that runs is the shell process i.e., think of it running /bin/sh -c on unix. The arguments you pass to Popen are passed as arguments to this shell process. So /bin/sh -c 'echo' '$HOME' prints newline and the second argument is ignored. So usually you should only use string arguments with shell=True.