From: John Williams

- Would you consider adding an example of how to chain processes together into a pipeline? You say this is possible, and I'm assuming that's what the PIPE constant is for, but I'd like to see it written out to make sure I'm understanding it correctly.

There's actually an example in the source code. Looking at it, I have come to the conclusion that I don't like PIPE, but I can't see an obviously better answer. The example from the code is: p1 = Popen(["dmesg"], stdout=PIPE) p2 = Popen(["grep", "hda"], stdin=p1.fromchild) result = p2.communicate()[0] Some things immediately spring from this: 1. stdout=PIPE doesn't feel like it adds anything. It's "obvious" that I want a pipe. But of course there's no way the code realises that unless I say so. 2. fromchild doesn't look too nice. I'd prefer to use "stdin=p1.stdout". 3. communicate() doesn't really describe what it does very well. As far as PIPE goes, the issue is that there are (to me) two, almost equally common, options - to simply inherit the parent's stdXXX (like os.system does) and to set up pipes to (some or all of) the child's stdXXX, which the parent then talks to. PIPE says to set up a pipe, where the default is to inherit. I'd like to see a better option, but I can't immediately think of one. This cries out for a "just do what I mean" option :-) Maybe inverting the sense of the argument, and saying pipe=STDOUT, or in the case of multiple pipes, pipe=(STDIN, STDOUT), is better. What do people think? But remember that *all* of these look worse if you don't use from...import style: stdout=popen5.PIPE or pipe=popen5.STDOUT. Part of me wonders whether the creation of the child process should be split out of the constructor, so that we do p1 = Popen(...); p1.start(). Then setting up pipes could happen between the two. But I can't think of a syntax I like for setting up pipes even then, and I see no other advantage to a separate start() method. I'll see what this feels like when I have practical experience implementing the Windows version under my belt... Paul. PS If this becomes a design discussion, is python-dev (or even python-list) appropriate? Would it be better to set up a SIG for this, much like optparse had the getopt-sig for a while?