subprocess module and long-lived subprocesses

[Nobody]

On Fri, 20 Jan 2012 08:42:16 -0600, skip wrote:

> The library documentation doesn't talk a lot about long-lived subprocesses
> other than the possibility of deadlock when using Popen.wait().  Ideally, I
> would write to the subprocess's stdin, check for output on stdout and
> stderr, then lather, rinse, repeat.  Is it safe to assume that if the stdout
> and/or stderr pipes have nothing for me the reads on those file objects (I'm
> using PIPE for all three std* files) will return immediately with an empty
> string for output?  They won't block, will they?

They will. You need to use either threads, select() or non-blocking I/O in
order to avoid deadlock. See the definitions of subprocess._communicate()
(there's one version for Windows which uses threads and another for Unix
using select()).

> Will a broken pipe IOError get raised as for os.popen()

IOError(EPIPE) will be raised if you write to the stdin pipe when there
are no readers.

> or do I have to call Popen.poll() even in error situations?

Once you're finished with the process, you should close .stdin then
consume all output from .stdout and .stderr until both report EOF, then
call .wait(). That should cover any possible child behaviour (e.g. if
the child explicitly close()s its stdin, getting EPIPE doesn't mean that
you can forget about the process or that .wait() won't deadlock).