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

On Unix-like systems and Python 3.5+ there's os.set_blocking which does exactly what it says.

import os
import time
import subprocess

cmd = 'python3', '-c', 'import time; [(print(i), time.sleep(1)) for i in range(5)]'
p = subprocess.Popen(cmd, stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
os.set_blocking(p.stdout.fileno(), False)
start = time.time()
while True:
    # first iteration always produces empty byte string in non-blocking mode
    for i in range(2):    
        line = p.stdout.readline()
        print(i, line)
        time.sleep(0.5)
    if time.time() > start + 5:
        break
p.terminate()

This outputs:

1 b''
2 b'0\n'
1 b''
2 b'1\n'
1 b''
2 b'2\n'
1 b''
2 b'3\n'
1 b''
2 b'4\n'

With os.set_blocking commented it's:

0 b'0\n'
1 b'1\n'
0 b'2\n'
1 b'3\n'
0 b'4\n'
1 b''