subprocess.Popen inheriting

[Aaron Brady]

On Dec 17, 7:16 pm, "Gabriel Genellina" <gagsl-... at yahoo.com.ar>
wrote:
> En Wed, 17 Dec 2008 22:46:32 -0200, Aaron Brady <castiro... at gmail.com>  
> escribió:
>
>
>
> > On Dec 17, 5:05 pm, "Gabriel Genellina" <gagsl-... at yahoo.com.ar>
> > wrote:
> >> En Wed, 17 Dec 2008 12:21:38 -0200, Jeremy Sanders  
> >> <jeremy+complangpyt... at jeremysanders.net> escribió:
>
> >> > It would be nice if Python created pipes that are properly  
> >> inheritable by
> >> > default by child processes, as they're mostly used for IPC.
>
> >> I'd say it is a bug in os.pipe implementation; they should be  
> >> inheritable  
> >> by default, as in posix (after all, the code is in "posixmodule.c").
>
> > The code looks like this:
>
> >    ok = CreatePipe(&read, &write, NULL, 0);
> >    Py_END_ALLOW_THREADS
> >    if (!ok)
> >            return win32_error("CreatePipe", NULL);
> >    read_fd = _open_osfhandle((Py_intptr_t)read, 0);
> >    write_fd = _open_osfhandle((Py_intptr_t)write, 1);
>
> > 'If lpPipeAttributes is NULL, the handle cannot be inherited.'  You
> > could populate a 'SECURITY_ATTRIBUTES' structure, or call
> > DuplicateHandle on both of them.
>
> > A patch would look like this:
>
> > SECURITY_ATTRIBUTES sattribs;
> > sattribs.nLength = sizeof(sattribs);
> > sattribs.lpSecurityDescriptor = NULL;
> > sattribs.bInheritHandle = TRUE;
> > ok = CreatePipe(&read, &write, &sattribs, 0);
>
> Yes, that's exactly how os.popen does it (in posixmodule.c)
>
> > This still doesn't answer whether the file descriptor return by
> > '_open_osfhandle' can be inherited too.
>
> It doesn't matter. The OS only cares about file handles, not C RTL  
> structures.

Sorry for the multiple posts.  File handles are inheritable by child
processes, if the permissions are right.  File descriptors are not.
Is there a way that we can get the handles of a pipe into code, so
that we can pass them to a subprocess?  Will it take calling
'CreatePipe' from ctypes directly if on Windows?  Or can 'os.pipe' be
made to abstract that?  If Windows can't inherit descriptors,
'os.pipe' should return handles, and 'os.read' &co. should accept
them.

It is a fairly large patch.