How to duplicate sys.stdout to a log file?

Question

Edit: Since it appears that there\'s either no solution, or I\'m doing something so non-standard that nobody knows - I\'ll revise my question to also ask: What is the best w

Answer 1

Since you're comfortable spawning external processes from your code, you could use tee itself. I don't know of any Unix system calls that do exactly what tee does.

# Note this version was written circa Python 2.6, see below for
# an updated 3.3+-compatible version.
import subprocess, os, sys

# Unbuffer output (this ensures the output is in the correct order)
sys.stdout = os.fdopen(sys.stdout.fileno(), 'w', 0)

tee = subprocess.Popen(["tee", "log.txt"], stdin=subprocess.PIPE)
os.dup2(tee.stdin.fileno(), sys.stdout.fileno())
os.dup2(tee.stdin.fileno(), sys.stderr.fileno())

print "\nstdout"
print >>sys.stderr, "stderr"
os.spawnve("P_WAIT", "/bin/ls", ["/bin/ls"], {})
os.execve("/bin/ls", ["/bin/ls"], os.environ)

You could also emulate tee using the multiprocessing package (or use processing if you're using Python 2.5 or earlier).

Update

Here is a Python 3.3+-compatible version:

import subprocess, os, sys

tee = subprocess.Popen(["tee", "log.txt"], stdin=subprocess.PIPE)
# Cause tee's stdin to get a copy of our stdin/stdout (as well as that
# of any child processes we spawn)
os.dup2(tee.stdin.fileno(), sys.stdout.fileno())
os.dup2(tee.stdin.fileno(), sys.stderr.fileno())

# The flush flag is needed to guarantee these lines are written before
# the two spawned /bin/ls processes emit any output
print("\nstdout", flush=True)
print("stderr", file=sys.stderr, flush=True)

# These child processes' stdin/stdout are 
os.spawnve("P_WAIT", "/bin/ls", ["/bin/ls"], {})
os.execve("/bin/ls", ["/bin/ls"], os.environ)