Python: How to determine subprocess children have all finished running

Question

I am trying to detect when an installation program finishes executing from within a Python script. Specifically, the application is the Oracle 10gR2 Database. Currently I am usi

Answer 1

You can just use os.waitpid with the the pid set to -1, this will wait for all the subprocess of the current process until they finish:

import os
import sys
import subprocess


proc = subprocess.Popen([sys.executable,
                         '-c',
                         'import subprocess;'
                         'subprocess.Popen("sleep 5", shell=True).wait()'])

pid, status = os.waitpid(-1, 0)

print pid, status

This is the result of pstree of different subprocess forked:

python───python───sh───sleep

Hope this can help :)