How do I pass a string into subprocess.Popen (using the stdin argument)?

Question

If I do the following:

import subprocess
from cStringIO import StringIO
subprocess.Popen([\'grep\',\'f\'],stdout=subprocess.PIPE,stdin=StringIO(\'one\\ntwo\\         


        

Answer 1

Beware that Popen.communicate(input=s)may give you trouble ifsis too big, because apparently the parent process will buffer it before forking the child subprocess, meaning it needs "twice as much" used memory at that point (at least according to the "under the hood" explanation and linked documentation found here). In my particular case,swas a generator that was first fully expanded and only then written tostdin so the parent process was huge right before the child was spawned, and no memory was left to fork it:

File "/opt/local/stow/python-2.7.2/lib/python2.7/subprocess.py", line 1130, in _execute_child self.pid = os.fork() OSError: [Errno 12] Cannot allocate memory