Executing multiple commands using Popen.stdin

Question

I\'d like to execute multiple commands in a standalone application launched from a python script, using pipes. The only way I could reliably pass the commands to the stdin of th

Answer 1

Your code in the question should work as is. If it doesn't then either your actual code is different (e.g., you might use stdout=PIPE that may change the child buffering behavior) or it might indicate a bug in the child application itself such as the read-ahead bug in Python 2 i.e., your input is sent correctly by the parent process but it is stuck in the child's internal input buffer.

The following works on my Ubuntu machine:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import time
from subprocess import Popen, PIPE

LINE_BUFFERED = 1

#NOTE: the first argument is a list
p = Popen(['cat'], bufsize=LINE_BUFFERED, stdin=PIPE,
          universal_newlines=True)
with p.stdin:
    for cmd in ["doSomething1\n", "doSomethingElse\n"]:
        time.sleep(1) # a delay to see that the commands appear one by one
        p.stdin.write(cmd)
        p.stdin.flush() # use explicit flush() to workaround
                        #   buffering bugs on some Python versions
rc = p.wait()