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 way to accomplish logging when a python app is making a lot of system calls?

My app has two modes. In interactive mode, I want all output to go to the screen as well as to a log file, including output from any system calls. In daemon mode, all output goes to the log. Daemon mode works great using os.dup2(). I can't find a way to "tee" all output to a log in interactive mode, without modifying each and every system call.

---

In other words, I want the functionality of the command line 'tee' for any output generated by a python app, including system call output.

To clarify:

To redirect all output I do something like this, and it works great:

# open our log file
so = se = open("%s.log" % self.name, 'w', 0)

# re-open stdout without buffering
sys.stdout = os.fdopen(sys.stdout.fileno(), 'w', 0)

# redirect stdout and stderr to the log file opened above
os.dup2(so.fileno(), sys.stdout.fileno())
os.dup2(se.fileno(), sys.stderr.fileno())

The nice thing about this is that it requires no special print calls from the rest of the code. The code also runs some shell commands, so it's nice not having to deal with each of their output individually as well.

Simply, I want to do the same, except duplicating instead of redirecting.

At first thought, I thought that simply reversing the dup2's should work. Why doesn't it? Here's my test:

import os, sys

### my broken solution:
so = se = open("a.log", 'w', 0)
sys.stdout = os.fdopen(sys.stdout.fileno(), 'w', 0)

os.dup2(sys.stdout.fileno(), so.fileno())
os.dup2(sys.stderr.fileno(), se.fileno())
###

print("foo bar")

os.spawnve("P_WAIT", "/bin/ls", ["/bin/ls"], {})
os.execve("/bin/ls", ["/bin/ls"], os.environ)

The file "a.log" should be identical to what was displayed on the screen.

Answer 1

I had this same issue before and found this snippet very useful:

class Tee(object):
    def __init__(self, name, mode):
        self.file = open(name, mode)
        self.stdout = sys.stdout
        sys.stdout = self
    def __del__(self):
        sys.stdout = self.stdout
        self.file.close()
    def write(self, data):
        self.file.write(data)
        self.stdout.write(data)
    def flush(self):
        self.file.flush()

from: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2007-May/438106.html