Calling External Commands from Python: Separating Arguments, Exit Codes, and Timeouts

When automating tasks with Python, you often want to call other programs on your machine. However, there is not just one ...
Ars Technica

of strings and extending Python 3

I'm sure the answer is out there somewhere, but I must have overlooked it until now ... I have an X11 programme that I'm mostly using under Mac OS X (10.6.8) and for which I wrote a plugin to extend ...