subprocess module is sorely deficient?

[Harishankar]

On Tuesday 22 Apr 2008 17:06:26 Paul Boddie wrote:
> On 22 Apr, 12:52, Harishankar <v.harishan... at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Is there any way to use non-blocking Popen objects using subprocess? and
> > 2 - is there a way to kill the subprocess in a platform independent
> > manner in a purely Pythonic way? I thought initially that this problem is
> > simple enough, but over the last couple of days I've been really
> > struggling to find any answer. I've been through dozens of mailing list
> > archives in to find a solution. Unfortunately none of the solutions seem
> > to fit my needs.
>
> If you want some hints about using subprocesses with non-blocking I/O,
> you might find some in my jailtools and pprocess projects:
>
> http://www.python.org/pypi/jailtools
> http://www.python.org/pypi/pprocess
>
Thank you. I will take a look at those. Actually I feel a mechanism like this 
should be built-in to Python in the future. 

> Although these projects involve things which are not exactly cross-
> platform, the communications mechanisms should be portable, perhaps
> with a bit of effort (since I don't recall whether the poll library
> function is available on Windows, so you might have to use the select
> function instead). It can be awkward sustaining non-blocking
> communications with processes if they use buffered I/O, and the only
> way I could make Python-based subprocesses work in jailtools was to
> invoke them with the unbuffered option (-u).
>
> > My only solution seems to be to offer the end user the mencoder command
> > line and make them execute it manually and be done with it but that seems
> > a rather weak solution.
>
> The subprocess module may be an improvement over the popen2 module and
> various os module functions, but it's still rather arcane.

Yes. I am quite sure there must be an elegant solution to the subprocess 
handling/management. Problem is I've been at this for three days and I'm 
getting quite bleary eyed trying to pore through a lot of documentation ;-)

-- 
Regards,
V. Harishankar

http://hari.literaryforums.org
http://harishankar.org