A non-blocking read on a subprocess.PIPE in Python

Question

I\'m using the subprocess module to start a subprocess and connect to its output stream (standard output). I want to be able to execute non-blocking reads on its standard ou

Answer 1

One solution is to make another process to perform your read of the process, or make a thread of the process with a timeout.

Here's the threaded version of a timeout function:

http://code.activestate.com/recipes/473878/

However, do you need to read the stdout as it's coming in? Another solution may be to dump the output to a file and wait for the process to finish using p.wait().

f = open('myprogram_output.txt','w')
p = subprocess.Popen('myprogram.exe', stdout=f)
p.wait()
f.close()


str = open('myprogram_output.txt','r').read()