[Python-checkins] bpo-40707: Document that Popen.communicate sets the returncode attribute (GH-20283)

[Miss Islington (bot)]

https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/4f5dde463b588fc97cacb4a1905eb422b16daa37
commit: 4f5dde463b588fc97cacb4a1905eb422b16daa37
branch: 3.8
author: Miss Islington (bot) <31488909+miss-islington at users.noreply.github.com>
committer: GitHub <noreply at github.com>
date: 2020-06-23T20:19:35-07:00
summary:

bpo-40707: Document that Popen.communicate sets the returncode attribute (GH-20283)

(cherry picked from commit bf2e515fa43406d4bd9c4c53ecc9364034d8f9f6)

Co-authored-by: Gareth Rees <gdr at garethrees.org>

files:
M Doc/library/subprocess.rst

diff --git a/Doc/library/subprocess.rst b/Doc/library/subprocess.rst
index a0152a8009179..a93a6c186f8d8 100644
--- a/Doc/library/subprocess.rst
+++ b/Doc/library/subprocess.rst
@@ -704,10 +704,11 @@ Instances of the :class:`Popen` class have the following methods:
 .. method:: Popen.communicate(input=None, timeout=None)
 
    Interact with process: Send data to stdin.  Read data from stdout and stderr,
-   until end-of-file is reached.  Wait for process to terminate.  The optional
-   *input* argument should be data to be sent to the child process, or
-   ``None``, if no data should be sent to the child.  If streams were opened in
-   text mode, *input* must be a string.  Otherwise, it must be bytes.
+   until end-of-file is reached.  Wait for process to terminate and set the
+   :attr:`~Popen.returncode` attribute.  The optional *input* argument should be
+   data to be sent to the child process, or ``None``, if no data should be sent
+   to the child.  If streams were opened in text mode, *input* must be a string.
+   Otherwise, it must be bytes.
 
    :meth:`communicate` returns a tuple ``(stdout_data, stderr_data)``.
    The data will be strings if streams were opened in text mode; otherwise,