How to create non-blocking continuous reading from `stdin`?

Question

I have a single process, which has been created like this:

p = subprocess.Popen(args   = \'./myapp\',
                     stdin  = subprocess.PIPE,
                     


        

Answer 1

For everything working fine you have to flush output in main process (p.stdout) and subprocess (sys.stdout) .

communicate does both flush:

• it flush the p.stdin when closing it
• it wait the sys.stdout output to be flushed (just before exiting)

example of working main.py

import subprocess,time
import sys
p = subprocess.Popen(args   = ['python3', './myapp.py'],
                     stdin  = subprocess.PIPE,
                     stdout = subprocess.PIPE,
                     universal_newlines=True)

time.sleep(0.5)
p.stdin.write('my message\n')
p.stdin.flush()
#print("ici")
for i,l in  enumerate(iter(p.stdout.readline, ''),start=1):

    print("main:received:",i,repr(l))
    if i == 6:
        break
    print("mainprocess:send:other message n°{}".format(i))
    p.stdin.write("other message n°{}\n".format(i))
    p.stdin.flush()

print("main:waiting for subprocess")
p.stdin.close()    
p.wait()

example of myapp.py import queue,threading,sys,time,rpdb

q = queue.Queue()
def get_input():
    for line in iter(sys.stdin.readline, ''):
        q.put(line)
    sys.stdin.close()

threading.Thread(name   = 'input-getter',
                 target = get_input).start()
for i in range(6):
    try:
        l= q.get_nowait()
        print('myapp:input:', l,end="")
        sys.stdout.flush()

    except queue.Empty:
        print("myapp:no input")
        sys.stdout.flush()    
        time.sleep(1)

result:

main:received: 1 'myapp:no input\n'
mainprocess:send:other message n°1
main:received: 2 'myapp:input: my message\n'
mainprocess:send:other message n°2
main:received: 3 'myapp:input: other message n°1\n'
mainprocess:send:other message n°3
main:received: 4 'myapp:no input\n'
mainprocess:send:other message n°4
main:received: 5 'myapp:input: other message n°2\n'
mainprocess:send:other message n°5
main:received: 6 'myapp:input: other message n°3\n'
main:waiting for subprocess