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

Disclaimer: this works only for tornado

You can do this by setting the fd to be nonblocking and then use ioloop to register callbacks. I have packaged this in an egg called tornado_subprocess and you can install it via PyPI:

easy_install tornado_subprocess

now you can do something like this:

import tornado_subprocess
import tornado.ioloop

    def print_res( status, stdout, stderr ) :
    print status, stdout, stderr
    if status == 0:
        print "OK:"
        print stdout
    else:
        print "ERROR:"
        print stderr

t = tornado_subprocess.Subprocess( print_res, timeout=30, args=[ "cat", "/etc/passwd" ] )
t.start()
tornado.ioloop.IOLoop.instance().start()

you can also use it with a RequestHandler

class MyHandler(tornado.web.RequestHandler):
    def on_done(self, status, stdout, stderr):
        self.write( stdout )
        self.finish()

    @tornado.web.asynchronous
    def get(self):
        t = tornado_subprocess.Subprocess( self.on_done, timeout=30, args=[ "cat", "/etc/passwd" ] )
        t.start()