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

Things are a lot better in modern Python.

Here's a simple child program, "hello.py":

#!/usr/bin/env python3

while True:
    i = input()
    if i == "quit":
        break
    print(f"hello {i}")

And a program to interact with it:

import asyncio


async def main():
    proc = await asyncio.subprocess.create_subprocess_exec(
        "./hello.py", stdin=asyncio.subprocess.PIPE, stdout=asyncio.subprocess.PIPE
    )
    proc.stdin.write(b"bob\n")
    print(await proc.stdout.read(1024))
    proc.stdin.write(b"alice\n")
    print(await proc.stdout.read(1024))
    proc.stdin.write(b"quit\n")
    await proc.wait()


asyncio.run(main())

That prints out:

b'hello bob\n'
b'hello alice\n'

Note that the actual pattern, which is also by almost all of the previous answers, both here and in related questions, is to set the child's stdout file descriptor to non-blocking and then poll it in some sort of select loop. These days, of course, that loop is provided by asyncio.