how to avoid shell=True in subprocess

Question

I have subprocess command to check md5 checksum as

subprocess.check_output(\'md5 Downloads/test.txt\', stderr=subprocess.STDOUT, shell=True)

Answer 1

in case of complex commands , you can use shlex to pass the commands as a list to Check_Output or any other subprocess classes

from the document

shlex.split() can be useful when determining the correct tokenization for args, especially in complex cases:

https://docs.python.org/3.6/library/subprocess.html#subprocess.check_output

coming to above example

import shlex
inp="md5 Downloads/test.txt"
command=shlex.split(inp)
subprocess.check_output(command, stderr=subprocess.STDOUT)