are equivalent. This worries me, I would much rather always have it be one argument corresponding to exactly one shell argument. Here it looks like in some (maybe all?) cases arguments are split on spaces, which means always having to be extremely cautious about escaping, something a good abstraction shouldn't force you to deal with.
Exactly. If you look at the sources, you'll see that the arguments are all joined into a single string with spaces, then split back into separate words using shlex.split().
So cat("filename with spaces in it") will fail, but cat("'filename with spaces in it') ought to succeed.
It's a neat experiment, but using this module in production would not be a great idea.
