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

My problem is a bit different as I wanted to collect both stdout and stderr from a running process, but ultimately the same since I wanted to render the output in a widget as its generated.

I did not want to resort to many of the proposed workarounds using Queues or additional Threads as they should not be necessary to perform such a common task as running another script and collecting its output.

After reading the proposed solutions and python docs I resolved my issue with the implementation below. Yes it only works for POSIX as I'm using the select function call.

I agree that the docs are confusing and the implementation is awkward for such a common scripting task. I believe that older versions of python have different defaults for Popen and different explanations so that created a lot of confusion. This seems to work well for both Python 2.7.12 and 3.5.2.

The key was to set bufsize=1 for line buffering and then universal_newlines=True to process as a text file instead of a binary which seems to become the default when setting bufsize=1.

class workerThread(QThread):
   def __init__(self, cmd):
      QThread.__init__(self)
      self.cmd = cmd
      self.result = None           ## return code
      self.error = None            ## flag indicates an error
      self.errorstr = ""           ## info message about the error

   def __del__(self):
      self.wait()
      DEBUG("Thread removed")

   def run(self):
      cmd_list = self.cmd.split(" ")   
      try:
         cmd = subprocess.Popen(cmd_list, bufsize=1, stdin=None
                                        , universal_newlines=True
                                        , stderr=subprocess.PIPE
                                        , stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
      except OSError:
         self.error = 1
         self.errorstr = "Failed to execute " + self.cmd
         ERROR(self.errorstr)
      finally:
         VERBOSE("task started...")
      import select
      while True:
         try:
            r,w,x = select.select([cmd.stdout, cmd.stderr],[],[])
            if cmd.stderr in r:
               line = cmd.stderr.readline()
               if line != "":
                  line = line.strip()
                  self.emit(SIGNAL("update_error(QString)"), line)
            if cmd.stdout in r:
               line = cmd.stdout.readline()
               if line == "":
                  break
               line = line.strip()
               self.emit(SIGNAL("update_output(QString)"), line)
         except IOError:
            pass
      cmd.wait()
      self.result = cmd.returncode
      if self.result < 0:
         self.error = 1
         self.errorstr = "Task terminated by signal " + str(self.result)
         ERROR(self.errorstr)
         return
      if self.result:
         self.error = 1
         self.errorstr = "exit code " + str(self.result)
         ERROR(self.errorstr)
         return
      return

ERROR, DEBUG and VERBOSE are simply macros that print output to the terminal.

This solution is IMHO 99.99% effective as it still uses the blocking readline function, so we assume the sub process is nice and outputs complete lines.

I welcome feedback to improve the solution as I am still new to Python.