This recipe shows how to execute a unix shell command and capture the output and error streams in python. By contrast, os.system() sends both streams directly to the shell.
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Copy to clipboard1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 | import os, popen2, fcntl, FCNTL, select
def makeNonBlocking(fd):
fl = fcntl.fcntl(fd, FCNTL.F_GETFL)
try:
fcntl.fcntl(fd, FCNTL.F_SETFL, fl | FCNTL.O_NDELAY)
except AttributeError:
fcntl.fcntl(fd, FCNTL.F_SETFL, fl | FCNTL.FNDELAY)
def getCommandOutput(command):
child = popen2.Popen3(command, 1) # capture stdout and stderr from command
child.tochild.close() # don't need to talk to child
outfile = child.fromchild
outfd = outfile.fileno()
errfile = child.childerr
errfd = errfile.fileno()
makeNonBlocking(outfd) # don't deadlock!
makeNonBlocking(errfd)
outdata = errdata = ''
outeof = erreof = 0
while 1:
ready = select.select([outfd,errfd],[],[]) # wait for input
if outfd in ready[0]:
outchunk = outfile.read()
if outchunk == '': outeof = 1
outdata = outdata + outchunk
if errfd in ready[0]:
errchunk = errfile.read()
if errchunk == '': erreof = 1
errdata = errdata + errchunk
if outeof and erreof: break
select.select([],[],[],.1) # give a little time for buffers to fill
err = child.wait()
if err != 0:
raise RuntimeError, '%s failed w/ exit code %d\n%s' % (command, err, errdata)
return outdata
def getCommandOutput2(command):
child = os.popen(command)
data = child.read()
err = child.close()
if err:
raise RuntimeError, '%s failed w/ exit code %d' % (command, err)
return data
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The presented getCommandOutput(command) function will execute a command and will return the command's output. If the command fails, an exception will be raised with the text captured from the command's stderr.
Most of complexity of this code is due to the difficulty of capturing both the output and error streams of the child process at the same time. Normal (blocking) read calls may deadlock if the child is trying to write to one stream and the parent is waiting for data on the other stream, so the streams must be set to non-blocking and select() must be used to wait for data on the streams.
Note: the second select call adds a 0.1 second sleep after each read. This (counterintuitively) allows the code to run much faster since it gives the child time to put more data in the buffer. Without this, the parent may try to read only a few chars at a time which can be very expensive.
If you only want to capture the output and don't mind the error stream going to the terminal, you can use the much simpler code presented in getCommandOutput2. If you want to suppress the error stream altogether, you can append '2>/dev/null' to the command (e.g. 'ls -1 2>/dev/null').
Note: Python (as of version 2.0) now includes the os.popen4 function which combines the output and error streams of the child process. However, the streams are combined in a potentially very messy way depending on how they are buffered in the child process.
Empty Select Necessary? Wouldn't a call to time.sleep(0.1) work as well as the select([],[],[],.1) call? I might be missing something, but it seems like the only thing a call to select with three empty lists will do is sleep until the timeout.
Concatenating Output (Little) Inefficent. The concatenation of the program's output can be done in a more efficent way:
With outdata=outdata+outchunk, the data is copyed over and over. Probably not really problematic, but at least in theory it may lead to a quadratic running time. (The same is true of course for errdata...)
Differnet Approach: Using Tempfiles. I found the approach using tempfiles better:
cygwin and FCNTL.FNDELAY. regarding this code:
I don't see the .FNDELAY object defined in either the "fcnt" module or the "os" module.
What should I do here to adapt the recipe code to cygwin?
I'm using cygwin on windows 2000 and windows XP.
major performance bug.
Several problems with this recipe. There are several problems with this recipe... I know, I've made them all :-) I even wrote up a draft PEP addressing what I saw as Python problems which I abandoned after I understood things better. See the following thread;
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-March/052263.html
The problems are;
1) using file objects in non-blocking mode is bad. File object's behaviour is not clearly defined in non-blocking mode. Sure file.read() kinda works, but file.write() is broken, so you would hit serious problems with this approach if you had to also write data to the popened process. You should use os.read() and os.write() instead.
2) you don't need non-blocking mode. The os.read() and os.write() methods will do incomplete reads/writes in blocking mode. They will only block if nothing at all could be read/written. However, you should never attempt to read/write to a blocked file, because the select() tells you what files can at least be partialy read/written and hence will not block.
3) As pointed out by Pádraig Brady, it is bad to include "finished" files in the select() lists. When os.read() returns nothing, you have reached the end of the input, so close it and remove it from the select() list for any further iterations. The same goes for output files; close and remove them when you have written all your data. Otherwise your select statement imediately completes returning the empty file, and your polling loop races around doing nothing until one of the other files also has something.
4) That second select is ugly. As Bradey Honsinger said, a sleep would have been better to achieve what you wanted here. However, I suspect that the main reason you saw speedups by adding this is that you reduce the "loop racing" explained by point 3).
This recipe needs to be re-written...
Windows equivalent? I tried a slightly modified version of this recipie. And it works well on linux, however I have a hard time making it work on windows. The main problem is that windows doesn't allow select on files. I only do this for strout and stderr, and these are pipes, right? In linux pipes are just exposed as files, but they are really sockets. Anyone know how to make it work on windows?