gh-99238: clarify the type of the env dict. (GH-99253)

(cherry picked from commit 2eee9d9cd7eb1e396fa9a4af7c5fadeeafbdaa38)

Co-authored-by: Gregory P. Smith <greg@krypto.org>

diff --git a/Doc/library/subprocess.rst b/Doc/library/subprocess.rst
index f35a8204ce03623057feae6773667628eac94d4a..ae1cb8faa3beb57f61d686ba0e11a8a6a4031b06 100644 (file)
--- a/Doc/library/subprocess.rst
+++ b/Doc/library/subprocess.rst
@@ -80,8 +80,10 @@ underlying :class:`Popen` interface can be used directly.
 
    If *env* is not ``None``, it must be a mapping that defines the environment
    variables for the new process; these are used instead of the default
-   behavior of inheriting the current process' environment. It is passed directly
-   to :class:`Popen`.
+   behavior of inheriting the current process' environment. It is passed
+   directly to :class:`Popen`. This mapping can be str to str on any platform
+   or bytes to bytes on POSIX platforms much like :data:`os.environ` or
+   :data:`os.environb`.
 
    Examples::
 
@@ -611,7 +613,9 @@ functions.
 
    If *env* is not ``None``, it must be a mapping that defines the environment
    variables for the new process; these are used instead of the default
-   behavior of inheriting the current process' environment.
+   behavior of inheriting the current process' environment. This mapping can be
+   str to str on any platform or bytes to bytes on POSIX platforms much like
+   :data:`os.environ` or :data:`os.environb`.
 
    .. note::