popen problems

David McNab postmaster at 127.0.0.1
Thu Aug 21 00:08:17 EDT 2003


Hi,

When using os.popen, or popen2.Popen3 objects, I see a situation when
the child process sometimes doesn't get terminated, even when the child
program has exited.

It's like Python (2.2.3) intermittently leaves the process dangling.
Sometimes 'killall python' doesn't clean up these dead tasks.

The only solution I've found has been to write a temporary input file,
call os.system("myprog < /tmp/infile > /tmp/outfile"), read the outfile,
then delete the temporary in/out files.

The child program in my case is filter programs in SpamBayes, which I've
always observed as terminating properly.

Any ideas?

Cheers
David





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