A side effect of the changes made within are that getstatusoutput() on POSIX systems now returns a different value for status.

The old implementation present in Python 2 and Python 3.3 before this patch returned the raw waitpid() status result as the status value.  ie: getstatusoutput("exit 1")[0] == 256.  the lower 8 bits were reserved for the signal number the process died with, if any.

Now it returns the sanitized subprocess style returncode: positive numbers are the process exit code (so the above example returns 1) and negative numbers are the negative signal number the process died with.

I prefer the new behavior, but this API change is not documented anywhere that I can find.