subprocess module and long-lived subprocesses

[Skip Montanaro]

I'm converting some os.popen calls to use subprocess.Popen.  I had
previously been ignoring stdout and stderr when using os.popen.  The primary
motivation to switch to subprocess.Popen now is that I now want to check
stderr, so would have to make code changes to use os.popen[34] anyway.
Might as well go whole hog and switch to the new API.

The library documentation doesn't talk a lot about long-lived subprocesses
other than the possibility of deadlock when using Popen.wait().  Ideally, I
would write to the subprocess's stdin, check for output on stdout and
stderr, then lather, rinse, repeat.  Is it safe to assume that if the stdout
and/or stderr pipes have nothing for me the reads on those file objects (I'm
using PIPE for all three std* files) will return immediately with an empty
string for output?  They won't block, will they?  Will a broken pipe IOError
get raised as for os.popen() or do I have to call Popen.poll() even in error
situations?

Thanks,

-- 
Skip Montanaro - skip at pobox.com - http://www.smontanaro.net/