popen() is documented as using the shell, so I wouldn't use it if I follow my moral of the story above. Maybe you're referring to the "shebang" (#!/bin/sh), wh

popen() is documented as using the shell, so I wouldn't use it if I follow my moral of the story above. Maybe you're referring to the "shebang" (#!/bin/sh), whereby any executable, that you may have invoked without a shell, can signal that a shell should interpret it? I guess you have to strip down the environment to only the things you need to know. That's unfortunate, because the nice thing about the environment is that it's inherited, so the user can put in configuration that's needed 3 or 4 steps down the line from where it originated.