Now I'm not saying that this is the greatest name in the world, but here is the idea, as I understand it.
The popen family was originally in the os module and was an implementation of the venerable posix popen. Going to the subprocess module would be a good time to rename them, but I believe that saving Popen makes it easy to search documents for those with a long history with python or even with respectable posix functions.
From its earliest incarnation, posix Popenhas always been intended to open the process and allows you to read and write from your stdio as a file. Thus, the mnemonics for Popenis that it is short for ProcessOpenin an attempt to kind, sorta, look like open.
source
share