Grab input&output of program on Windows

[Tero Pihlajakoski]

Patrick L. Nolan <pln at cosmic.stanford.edu> wrote:
> I'm going nuts trying to port an application from Linux
> to Windows.  We have a python/Tkinter script which runs
> a C++ application.  It starts it with popen4 and 
> communicates through the two pipes.  It reads text output
> from stdout until a prompt appears, then sends commands
> through stdin.

Sorry, if this is basic, but: Did you flush() after write()? Try using
popen2() (there was something about popen4() on win32...), if possible
(import popen2, etc.)?

> On Windows it seems to get all tangled up in the buffering
> of the two streams.  When the script just reads stdout, it
> seems to be OK.  As soon as the first command is sent to
> stdin, stdout blocks forever.

> I tried borrowing an idea from the Python Cookbok, recipe
> 9.6.  I made the streams nonblocking and put a call to
> select in a loop.  The results were promising on Linux,
> but there was a mysterious error message on Windows.
> I think select works only for sockets, not pipes.

> This seems like the sort of thing that might be solved by
> expect.  Will that work?  Is there some other way?


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