One slight variation of what you propose would be to provide the extra path as a hint to cmd_runner.Popen(), which would first look for the utility there and if not found just move on and hope it's found somewhere in the $PATH. This way we don't have to mess with the environment, although it shouldn't be a problem as we should mess only with the environment of that single Popen invocation.
Oh, of course. That makes sense.
One slight variation of what you propose would be to provide the extra path as a hint to cmd_runner.Popen(), which would first look for the utility there and if not found just move on and hope it's found somewhere in the $PATH. This way we don't have to mess with the environment, although it shouldn't be a problem as we should mess only with the environment of that single Popen invocation.