spawning a process with subprocess

[kyosohma at gmail.com]

On Nov 26, 10:54 am, bhunter <brian.p.hun... at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've used subprocess with 2.4 several times to execute a process, wait
> for it to finish, and then look at its output.  Now I want to spawn
> the process separately, later check to see if it's finished, and if it
> is look at its output.  I may want to send a signal at some point to
> kill the process.  This seems straightforward, but it doesn't seem to
> be working.
>
> Here's my test case:
>
> import subprocess, time
>
> cmd = "cat somefile"
> thread = subprocess.Popen(args=cmd.split(), shell=True,
> stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stdin=subprocess.PIPE,
> stderr=subprocess.STDOUT, close_fds=True)
>
> while(1):
>       time.sleep(1)
>       if(thread.returncode):
>          break
>       else:
>          print thread.returncode
>
> print "returncode = ", thread.returncode
> for line in thread.stdout:
>    print "stdout:\t",line
>
> This will just print the returncode of None forever until I Ctrl-C it.
>
> Of course, the program works fine if I call thread.communicate(), but
> since this waits for the process to finish, that's not what I want.
>
> Any help would be appreciated.

I've read that this sort of thing can be a pain. I'm sure someone will
post and have other views though. I have had some success using
Python's threading module though. There's a pretty good walkthrough
here (it uses wxPython in its example):

http://wiki.wxpython.org/LongRunningTasks

Other places of interest include:

http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/491281
http://uucode.com/texts/pylongopgui/pyguiapp.html
http://sayspy.blogspot.com/2007/11/idea-for-process-concurrency.html

If I were doing something like this, I would have the process write
it's output to a file and periodically check to see if the file has
data.

Hopefully someone with more knowledge will come along soon.

Mike