Suppose your input to any of these contains quotation marks, or perhaps a mix of quotation marks. Then you have to use more and more exotic forms of quoting and

Suppose your input to any of these contains quotation marks, or perhaps a mix of quotation marks. Then you have to use more and more exotic forms of quoting and escaping. In Python 2.7, encoding to Base64 in a pipe used to be a mouthful: echo "foo" | python2.7 -c 'import sys; print sys.stdin.read().encode("base64")' Now it's even worse: echo "foo" | python3 -c 'import base64,sys; print(base64.b64encode(sys.stdin.buffer.read()).decode("ascii"))' As an aside, the base64 module is a good example of how rough the Python standard library is, and it seems like no one is being a gatekeeper of new changes. Almost no one wants base64.decode, but base64.b64decode. Or maybe base64.standard_b64encode? Or base64.encodebytes? Not to mention the majority of functions in the module are _not_ related to Base64 but other encodings.