bpo-13826: Clarify Popen constructor example (GH-18438)
Clarifies that the use of `shlex.split` is more instructive than
normative, and provides a simpler example.
https://bugs.python.org/issue13826
(cherry picked from commit 95d024d585bd3ed627437a2f0cbc783c8a014c8a)
Co-authored-by: Tim D. Smith <github@tim-smith.us>
diff --git a/Doc/library/subprocess.rst b/Doc/library/subprocess.rst
index ea12cd1..cce7da1 100644
--- a/Doc/library/subprocess.rst
+++ b/Doc/library/subprocess.rst
@@ -355,14 +355,20 @@
arguments for additional differences from the default behavior. Unless
otherwise stated, it is recommended to pass *args* as a sequence.
+ An example of passing some arguments to an external program
+ as a sequence is::
+
+ Popen(["/usr/bin/git", "commit", "-m", "Fixes a bug."])
+
On POSIX, if *args* is a string, the string is interpreted as the name or
path of the program to execute. However, this can only be done if not
passing arguments to the program.
.. note::
- :meth:`shlex.split` can be useful when determining the correct
- tokenization for *args*, especially in complex cases::
+ It may not be obvious how to break a shell command into a sequence of arguments,
+ especially in complex cases. :meth:`shlex.split` can illustrate how to
+ determine the correct tokenization for *args*::
>>> import shlex, subprocess
>>> command_line = input()