From: Miss Islington (bot) <31488909+miss-islington@users.noreply.github.com>
Date: Thu, 22 Jul 2021 18:25:31 +0000 (-0700)
Subject: bpo-14879: [doc] clarify how to check for errors from subprocess.Popen(..., shell... 
X-Git-Tag: v3.9.7~138
X-Git-Url: http://git.ipfire.org/gitweb.cgi?a=commitdiff_plain;h=5ffbb05f1c3c952588ba5c1927da0e8223f5aaa7;p=thirdparty%2FPython%2Fcpython.git

bpo-14879: [doc] clarify how to check for errors from subprocess.Popen(..., shell=True) (GH-26755) (GH-27289)

(cherry picked from commit 50ffbe3dafcae7826d114df61d56c7ac45a6358c)

Co-authored-by: Jack DeVries <58614260+jdevries3133@users.noreply.github.com>
---

diff --git a/Doc/library/subprocess.rst b/Doc/library/subprocess.rst
index 762da9b1b4dc..67754a7299df 100644
--- a/Doc/library/subprocess.rst
+++ b/Doc/library/subprocess.rst
@@ -662,7 +662,10 @@ execute, will be re-raised in the parent.
 
 The most common exception raised is :exc:`OSError`.  This occurs, for example,
 when trying to execute a non-existent file.  Applications should prepare for
-:exc:`OSError` exceptions.
+:exc:`OSError` exceptions. Note that, when ``"shell=True"``, :exc:`OSError`
+will be raised by the child only if the selected shell itself was not found.
+To determine if the shell failed to find the requested application, it is
+necessary to check the return code or output from the subprocess.
 
 A :exc:`ValueError` will be raised if :class:`Popen` is called with invalid
 arguments.