[tocomment]

I completely agree about subprocess. One thing I like about Perl is that it's dead easy to make a system call. I wish subprocess had a shortcut that's easy to remember/use.

[icebraining]

    run = lambda cmd: subprocess.check_output(cmd, shell=True)

    data = run("ps -e")

[lloeki]

I do something which looks largely the same, except I call it backtick