Formatting a command in python subprocess popen

Question

I am trying to format the following awk command

awk -v OFS=\"\\t\" \'{printf \"chr%s\\t%s\\t%s\\n\", $1, $2-1, $2}\' file1.txt > file2.txt

Answer 1

1. The simplest method, especially if you wish to keep the output redirection stuff, is to use subprocess with shell=True - then you only need to escape Python special characters. The line, as a whole, will be interpreted by the default shell.

   • WARNING: do not use this with untrusted input without sanitizing it first!

2. Alternatively, you can replace the command line with an argv-type sequence and feed that to subprocess instead. Then, you need to provide stuff as the program would see it:

   • remove all the shell-level escaping
   • remove the output redirection stuff and do the redirection yourself instead

Regarding the specific problems:

• you didn't escape Python special characters in the string so \t and \n became the literal tab and newline (try to print awk_command)

• using shlex.split is nothing different from shell=True - with an added unreliability since it cannot guarantee if would parse the string the same way your shell would in every case (not to mention the lack of transmutations the shell makes).

  • Specifically, it doesn't know or care about the special meaning of the redirection part:

    >>> awk_command = """awk -v OFS="\\t" '{printf "chr%s\\t%s\\t%s\\n", $1, $2- 1, $2}' file1.txt > file2.txt"""
    >>> shlex.split(awk_command)
    ['awk','-v','OFS=\\t','{printf "chr%s\\t%s\\t%s\\n", $1, $2-1, $2}','file1.txt','>','file2.txt']
    

So, if you wish to use shell=False, do construct the argument list yourself.