Yes, you can quote the values and embed them directly, but what if you want to do something like this? shell('echo "Hello, {user}"') You would have to do

Yes, you can quote the values and embed them directly, but what if you want to do something like this? shell('echo "Hello, {user}"') You would have to do something like: arg_for_echo = f"Hello, {user}" shell(f"echo {shlex.quote(arg_for_echo)}") The main drawback of quoting values like that is that you can't embed them inside an argument in the shell. The environment variable "trick" I used avoids this problem. Using quotes to sanitize arguments like that is how google/zx (library for writing shell/JS hybrid scripts) handles arguments: https://google.github.io/zx/quotes https://google.github.io/zx/quotes