Some general questions about using "stdin","stdout"....

[Diez B. Roggisch]

asdsd sir wrote:

> Hi!I'm new in Python and i'd like to ask some general questions about
> stdin,stdout...
> 
> Firstly...
> 
> if we type like something like :
>    cat "file.txt"|python somefile.py
> 
> #somefile.py
>     import sys
>      text=sys.stdin.read()
> 
> 
> ...then "sys.stdin.read()" will read from "cat"s stdout...
> However,if i type inside a program,something like....
> 
> #someprog.py
>     import sys
>    print "hello"|sys.stdin.read()
> 
> .....the screen hangs..why is that?isn't the same situation as "cat"?

Obviously not... The stdin is a read-only file that you can read from the
data that is passed via a pipe to your application. You did tha piping by
using

cat "file.txt" | python somefile.py

That establihes the pipe between cat's stdout(!) and python's stdin. That's
the reason that | is called "pipe" or "pipe-operator" in the SHELL(!)

print "hello"|sys.stdin.read()

OTH is inside python, and | is not the pipe-operator, but the binary
or-operator. Consider this:

>>> print 1 | 2
3

But:
>>> print "hello" | "some other string"
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for |: 'str' and 'str'


So you don't write something to stdin by that. Instead it waits endlessly,
trying to read something that is piped to it from the outside. But if that
was the case, it would puke on you with the above error message.

> in addition to this...
> Why can't i "write" to the stdin?
> Isn't it being used as a file object like all the others?
> for example
> sys.stdin.close() or
> open('sys.stdin','w+') or
> sys.stdin.write("something") etc... don't work...

Because it is defined that way. I suggest you read up on unix piping to
grasp the concepts behind it - python only follows these.


Diez