read on pipe, interrupted system call

[Susan Williams]

I'm using the commands.py library module, which is basically
os.system using popen to give you the command's output.
I'm running 1.5 on Solaris (threads and Tkinter linked in,
the app is a Tkinter app with no threads).

A number of commands are executed to do "ln -s file1 file2"
using commands.getstatusoutput("ln -s ...").  This does a popen,
gets a pipe in return, and does a read on the pipe.
It is really common for the read to get an IOError exception 
with value "Interrupted system call."  (but not every time!)

I can't get it to fail in a simple example, only in this large
application I've got that was written with 1.3, running on slow
sparc 1's and 2's instead of the Ultra 10s and 60s I'm using
now.

Does this ring a bell with anyone?  I tried suppressing signals,
and the complaint changes to "No child processes." as though the 
signal in question might be SIGCHLD.  I don't think any alarms
are set (I tried adding signal.alarm(0)).

thanks,
susan

---------------------------------------------------------------------
 Susan Williams     (763) 781-0308   Provis Corporation        
 susan at provis.com   (888) 242-4421   3989 Central Avenue Suite 450
 Software Engineer                   Columbia Heights, MN 55421-3900