[issue7213] subprocess leaks open file descriptors between Popen instances causing hangs

[Giovanni Bajo]

Giovanni Bajo <giovannibajo at gmail.com> added the comment:

Hi Gregory,

will you backport Mirko's patches to subprocess32?

The last thing left in this bug is my proposal to change the default of close_fds to True to Windows too, but at the same time detect whether this is possible or not (depending on the pipe redirections). 

So basically close_fds=True would be changed to mean "close the FDs, if it is possible, otherwise never mind". This is not a break in compatibility on Linux/UNIX (where it is always "possible"), nor Windows (where currently it just raises a ValueError if you ask it to raise close the file descriptors while doing redirections).

The rationale for this change is again cross-compatibility. I don't like when my code breaks because of a limitation of an OS that has a clear workaround. Subprocess is a high-level library after all, it's not like os.fork() or similar low-level libraries which expose the underlying platform differences.

----------

_______________________________________
Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue7213>
_______________________________________