[Python-Dev] fork or exec?

[Antoine Pitrou]

Le Thu, 10 Jan 2013 12:59:02 +0100,
Victor Stinner <victor.stinner at gmail.com> a écrit :

> 2013/1/10 Charles-François Natali <neologix at free.fr>:
> > Disclaimer: I'm not saying we should be changing all FDs to
> > close-on-exec by default like Ruby did, I'm just saying that
> > there's a real problem.
> 
> I changed my mind, the PEP does not propose to change the *default*
> behaviour (don't set close-on-exec by default).
> 
> But the PEP proposes to *add a function* to change the default
> behaviour. Application developers taking care of security can set
> close-on-exec by default, but they will have maybe to fix bugs (add
> cloexec=False argument, call os.set_cloexec(fd, True)) because
> something may expect an inheried file descriptor.

Do you have an example of what that "something" may be?
Apart from standard streams, I can't think of any inherited file
descriptor an external program would want to rely on.

In other words, I think close-on-exec by default is probably a
reasonable decision.

Regards

Antoine.