> Yeah, most of that comes from the verbose process needed to invoke a process, right? I think it's more incongruence between the languages. os.system() will

> Yeah, most of that comes from the verbose process needed to invoke a process, right? I think it's more incongruence between the languages. os.system() will technically call a command. subprocess is a big step up from popen2, but Perl was much more streamlined and terse. That also applies to one-liners when you're in a shell. With Python you just have differences in a bunch of things; error handling? I often have to look up error codes, catch the exception then check for error codes. Pipe data in? Test for sys.stdin.isatty() then read from sys.stdin or fallback to sys.argv--it's not obscure, just not particularly Pythonic. The list goes on and on. It will probably take ~20 lines to properly deal with shelling out and if you do things wrong you could deadlock[1]. On the plus side, discouraging shelling out means your code is more portable =P [1] https://docs.python.org/3.8/library/subprocess.html#subprocess.Popen.wait https://docs.python.org/3.8/library/subprocess.html#subproce...