[Python-Dev] fork or exec?

[Vinay Sajip]

Charles-François Natali <cf.natali <at> gmail.com> writes:

> > 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.
> 
> Indeed, it should be really rare.

GnuPG allows communicating with it through arbitrary file descriptors [1]. For
example, if you use the command-line argument

--passphrase-fd n

then it will attempt to read the passphrase from file descriptor n. If n is 0,
it reads from stdin, as one would expect, but you can use other values for the
fd. There are several other such command line options.

How would that sit with the current proposal? I maintain a wrapper, python-gnupg,
which communicates with the GnuPG process through subprocess. Although there is
no in-built use of these parameters, users are allowed to pass additional
parameters to GnuPG, and they might use these esoteric GnuPG options.

Regards,

Vinay Sajip


[1] http://www.gnupg.org/documentation/manuals/gnupg-devel/GPG-Esoteric-Options.html