Python Subprocess.Run inserting escape characters into program arguments

Question

subprocess.run([program,'-force-gfx-jobs native -token='+PHPSESSID+ ' -config={"BackendURL":"https://prod.app.com","Version","live"}'])

When this command is run and you took in task manager at the command line values passed to the program the double quotes are prefixed by backslashes like this

subprocess.run([program,'-force-gfx-jobs native -token='+PHPSESSID+ ' -config={\"BackendURL\":\"https://prod.app.com\",\"Version\",\"live\"}'])

tripleee · Accepted Answer · 2020-07-09 07:29:38Z

1

You are passing a single string where you should be passing a list of strings.

subprocess.run([program,'-force-gfx-jobs', 'native',
     '-token='+PHPSESSID, '-config={"BackendURL":"https://prod.app.com","Version","live"}'])

I don't think the displayed backslashes are a problem; they are just for disambiguation (but this is Windows, so I'm probably underestimating the amount of crazy).

answered Jul 9, 2020 at 7:29

tripleee

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2 Comments

Eryk Sun Over a year ago

In Windows, every process has to parse its own command line string into arguments, i.e. there is no equivalent of a Unix argv array at the OS level. But there are standard argument parsing rules at least that are used by the Windows C runtime library and CommandLineToArgvW. When subprocess args is a list, subprocess.list2cmdline is called to build WinAPI CreateProcessW lpCommandLine according to these rules, including escaping literal double quote characters.

Eryk Sun Over a year ago

If you already have a command line that's prepared according to these rules, or if you need to pass a command line to a process that uses different rules (e.g. Cygwin programs follow Unix shell rules), then it makes more sense in Windows to simply pass subprocess args as a string. Don't try to manually parse the command line into a list just to have subprocess.list2cmdline rebuild it, potentially in a way that won't work.

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