Python, Popen and select - waiting for a process to terminate or a timeout

Question

I run a subprocess using:

  p = subprocess.Popen("subprocess", 
                       stdout=subprocess.PIPE, 
                       stderr=subprocess.PIPE, 
                       stdin=subprocess.PIPE)

This subprocess could either exit immediately with an error on stderr, or keep running. I want to detect either of these conditions - the latter by waiting for several seconds.

I tried this:

  SECONDS_TO_WAIT = 10
  select.select([], 
                [p.stdout, p.stderr], 
                [p.stdout, p.stderr],
                SECONDS_TO_WAIT)

but it just returns:

  ([],[],[])

on either condition. What can I do?

Answer 1

Have you tried using the Popen.Poll() method. You could just do this:

p = subprocess.Popen("subprocess", 
                   stdout=subprocess.PIPE, 
                   stderr=subprocess.PIPE, 
                   stdin=subprocess.PIPE)

time.sleep(SECONDS_TO_WAIT)
retcode = p.poll()
if retcode is not None:
   # process has terminated

This will cause you to always wait 10 seconds, but if the failure case is rare this would be amortized over all the success cases.

---

Edit:

How about:

t_nought = time.time()
seconds_passed = 0

while(p.poll() is not None and seconds_passed < 10):
    seconds_passed = time.time() - t_nought

if seconds_passed >= 10:
   #TIMED OUT

This has the ugliness of being a busy wait, but I think it accomplishes what you want.

Additionally looking at the select call documentation again I think you may want to change it as follows:

SECONDS_TO_WAIT = 10
  select.select([p.stderr], 
                [], 
                [p.stdout, p.stderr],
                SECONDS_TO_WAIT)

Since you would typically want to read from stderr, you want to know when it has something available to read (ie the failure case).

I hope this helps.