Constantly print Subprocess output while process is running

Question

To launch programs from my Python-scripts, I'm using the following method:

def execute(command):
    process = subprocess.Popen(command, shell=True, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.STDOUT)
    output = process.communicate()[0]
    exitCode = process.returncode

    if (exitCode == 0):
        return output
    else:
        raise ProcessException(command, exitCode, output)

So when i launch a process like Process.execute("mvn clean install"), my program waits until the process is finished, and only then i get the complete output of my program. This is annoying if i'm running a process that takes a while to finish.

Can i let my program write the process output line by line, by polling the process output before it finishes in a loop or something?

**[EDIT] Sorry i didn't search very well before posting this question. Threading is actually the key. Found an example here which shows how to do it: ** Python Subprocess.Popen from a thread

Answer 1

You can use iter to process lines as soon as the command outputs them: lines = iter(fd.readline, ""). Here's a full example showing a typical use case (thanks to @jfs for helping out):

from __future__ import print_function # Only Python 2.x
import subprocess

def execute(cmd):
    popen = subprocess.Popen(cmd, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, universal_newlines=True)
    for stdout_line in iter(popen.stdout.readline, ""):
        yield stdout_line 
    popen.stdout.close()
    return_code = popen.wait()
    if return_code:
        raise subprocess.CalledProcessError(return_code, cmd)

# Example
for path in execute(["locate", "a"]):
    print(path, end="")