Here is a toy example of process substitution that works fine in Bash:
$ wc -l <(pwd)
1 /proc/self/fd/11
So why does the same command give a syntax error when invoked from Python's subprocess with shell=True?
>>> subprocess.check_call('wc -l <(pwd)', shell=True)
/bin/sh: 1: Syntax error: "(" unexpected
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "/path/to/my/python/lib/python3.5/subprocess.py", line 581, in check_call
raise CalledProcessError(retcode, cmd)
subprocess.CalledProcessError: Command 'wc -l <(pwd)' returned non-zero exit status 2