Getting realtime output using subprocess

Question

I am trying to write a wrapper script for a command line program (svnadmin verify) that will display a nice progress indicator for the operation. This requires me to be able to see each line of output from the wrapped program as soon as it is output.

I figured that I'd just execute the program using subprocess.Popen, use stdout=PIPE, then read each line as it came in and act on it accordingly. However, when I ran the following code, the output appeared to be buffered somewhere, causing it to appear in two chunks, lines 1 through 332, then 333 through 439 (the last line of output)

from subprocess import Popen, PIPE, STDOUT

p = Popen('svnadmin verify /var/svn/repos/config', stdout = PIPE, 
        stderr = STDOUT, shell = True)
for line in p.stdout:
    print line.replace('\n', '')

After looking at the documentation on subprocess a little, I discovered the bufsize parameter to Popen, so I tried setting bufsize to 1 (buffer each line) and 0 (no buffer), but neither value seemed to change the way the lines were being delivered.

At this point I was starting to grasp for straws, so I wrote the following output loop:

while True:
    try:
        print p.stdout.next().replace('\n', '')
    except StopIteration:
        break

but got the same result.

Is it possible to get 'realtime' program output of a program executed using subprocess? Is there some other option in Python that is forward-compatible (not exec*)?

Answer 1

I tried this, and for some reason while the code

for line in p.stdout:
  ...

buffers aggressively, the variant

while True:
  line = p.stdout.readline()
  if not line: break
  ...

does not. Apparently this is a known bug: http://bugs.python.org/issue3907 (The issue is now "Closed" as of Aug 29, 2018)

Answer 2

Complete solution:

import contextlib
import subprocess

# Unix, Windows and old Macintosh end-of-line
newlines = ['\n', '\r\n', '\r']
def unbuffered(proc, stream='stdout'):
    stream = getattr(proc, stream)
    with contextlib.closing(stream):
        while True:
            out = []
            last = stream.read(1)
            # Don't loop forever
            if last == '' and proc.poll() is not None:
                break
            while last not in newlines:
                # Don't loop forever
                if last == '' and proc.poll() is not None:
                    break
                out.append(last)
                last = stream.read(1)
            out = ''.join(out)
            yield out

def example():
    cmd = ['ls', '-l', '/']
    proc = subprocess.Popen(
        cmd,
        stdout=subprocess.PIPE,
        stderr=subprocess.STDOUT,
        # Make all end-of-lines '\n'
        universal_newlines=True,
    )
    for line in unbuffered(proc):
        print line

example()

Answer 3

Found this "plug-and-play" function here. Worked like a charm!

import subprocess

def myrun(cmd):
    """from http://blog.kagesenshi.org/2008/02/teeing-python-subprocesspopen-output.html
    """
    p = subprocess.Popen(cmd, shell=True, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.STDOUT)
    stdout = []
    while True:
        line = p.stdout.readline()
        stdout.append(line)
        print line,
        if line == '' and p.poll() != None:
            break
    return ''.join(stdout)

Answer 4

Depending on the use case, you might also want to disable the buffering in the subprocess itself.

If the subprocess will be a Python process, you could do this before the call:

os.environ["PYTHONUNBUFFERED"] = "1"

Or alternatively pass this in the env argument to Popen.

Otherwise, if you are on Linux/Unix, you can use the stdbuf tool. E.g. like:

cmd = ["stdbuf", "-oL"] + cmd

See also here about stdbuf or other options.

(See also here for the same answer.)

Answer 5

You can direct the subprocess output to the streams directly. Simplified example:

subprocess.run(['ls'], stderr=sys.stderr, stdout=sys.stdout)

Answer 6

This is the basic skeleton that I always use for this. It makes it easy to implement timeouts and is able to deal with inevitable hanging processes.

import subprocess
import threading
import Queue

def t_read_stdout(process, queue):
    """Read from stdout"""

    for output in iter(process.stdout.readline, b''):
        queue.put(output)

    return

process = subprocess.Popen(['dir'],
                           stdout=subprocess.PIPE,
                           stderr=subprocess.STDOUT,
                           bufsize=1,
                           cwd='C:\\',
                           shell=True)

queue = Queue.Queue()
t_stdout = threading.Thread(target=t_read_stdout, args=(process, queue))
t_stdout.daemon = True
t_stdout.start()

while process.poll() is None or not queue.empty():
    try:
        output = queue.get(timeout=.5)

    except Queue.Empty:
        continue

    if not output:
        continue

    print(output),

t_stdout.join()