Getting realtime output using subprocess

Question

I am trying to write a wrapper script for a command line program (svnadmin verify) that will display a nice progress indicator for the operation. This requires me to be abl

Answer 1

p = subprocess.Popen(cmd, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, bufsize=1)
for line in iter(p.stdout.readline, b''):
    print line,
p.stdout.close()
p.wait()

Answer 2

I used this solution to get realtime output on a subprocess. This loop will stop as soon as the process completes leaving out a need for a break statement or possible infinite loop.

sub_process = subprocess.Popen(my_command, close_fds=True, shell=True, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE)

while sub_process.poll() is None:
    out = sub_process.stdout.read(1)
    sys.stdout.write(out)
    sys.stdout.flush()

Answer 3

Real Time Output Issue resolved: I encountered a similar issue in Python, while capturing the real time output from C program. I added fflush(stdout); in my C code. It worked for me. Here is the code.

C program:

#include <stdio.h>
void main()
{
    int count = 1;
    while (1)
    {
        printf(" Count  %d\n", count++);
        fflush(stdout);
        sleep(1);
    }
}

Python program:

#!/usr/bin/python

import os, sys
import subprocess


procExe = subprocess.Popen(".//count", shell=True, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE, universal_newlines=True)

while procExe.poll() is None:
    line = procExe.stdout.readline()
    print("Print:" + line)

Output:

Print: Count  1
Print: Count  2
Print: Count  3

Answer 4

I tried this, and for some reason while the code

for line in p.stdout:
  ...

buffers aggressively, the variant

while True:
  line = p.stdout.readline()
  if not line: break
  ...

does not. Apparently this is a known bug: http://bugs.python.org/issue3907 (The issue is now "Closed" as of Aug 29, 2018)

Answer 5

The Streaming subprocess stdin and stdout with asyncio in Python blog post by Kevin McCarthy shows how to do it with asyncio:

import asyncio
from asyncio.subprocess import PIPE
from asyncio import create_subprocess_exec


async def _read_stream(stream, callback):
    while True:
        line = await stream.readline()
        if line:
            callback(line)
        else:
            break


async def run(command):
    process = await create_subprocess_exec(
        *command, stdout=PIPE, stderr=PIPE
    )

    await asyncio.wait(
        [
            _read_stream(
                process.stdout,
                lambda x: print(
                    "STDOUT: {}".format(x.decode("UTF8"))
                ),
            ),
            _read_stream(
                process.stderr,
                lambda x: print(
                    "STDERR: {}".format(x.decode("UTF8"))
                ),
            ),
        ]
    )

    await process.wait()


async def main():
    await run("docker build -t my-docker-image:latest .")


if __name__ == "__main__":
    loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
    loop.run_until_complete(main())

Answer 6

Few answers suggesting python 3.x or pthon 2.x , Below code will work for both.

 p = subprocess.Popen(cmd, shell=True, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.STDOUT,)
    stdout = []
    while True:
        line = p.stdout.readline()
        if not isinstance(line, (str)):
            line = line.decode('utf-8')
        stdout.append(line)
        print (line)
        if (line == '' and p.poll() != None):
            break