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

You may use an iterator over each byte in the output of the subprocess. This allows inline update (lines ending with '\r' overwrite previous output line) from the subprocess:

from subprocess import PIPE, Popen

command = ["my_command", "-my_arg"]

# Open pipe to subprocess
subprocess = Popen(command, stdout=PIPE, stderr=PIPE)


# read each byte of subprocess
while subprocess.poll() is None:
    for c in iter(lambda: subprocess.stdout.read(1) if subprocess.poll() is None else {}, b''):
        c = c.decode('ascii')
        sys.stdout.write(c)
sys.stdout.flush()

if subprocess.returncode != 0:
    raise Exception("The subprocess did not terminate correctly.")

Answer 2

Using pexpect [ http://www.noah.org/wiki/Pexpect ] with non-blocking readlines will resolve this problem. It stems from the fact that pipes are buffered, and so your app's output is getting buffered by the pipe, therefore you can't get to that output until the buffer fills or the process dies.

Answer 3

I used this solution to get realtime output on a subprocess. This loop will stop as soon as the process completes leaving out a need for a break statement or possible infinite loop.

sub_process = subprocess.Popen(my_command, close_fds=True, shell=True, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE)

while sub_process.poll() is None:
    out = sub_process.stdout.read(1)
    sys.stdout.write(out)
    sys.stdout.flush()

Answer 4

The Streaming subprocess stdin and stdout with asyncio in Python blog post by Kevin McCarthy shows how to do it with asyncio:

import asyncio
from asyncio.subprocess import PIPE
from asyncio import create_subprocess_exec


async def _read_stream(stream, callback):
    while True:
        line = await stream.readline()
        if line:
            callback(line)
        else:
            break


async def run(command):
    process = await create_subprocess_exec(
        *command, stdout=PIPE, stderr=PIPE
    )

    await asyncio.wait(
        [
            _read_stream(
                process.stdout,
                lambda x: print(
                    "STDOUT: {}".format(x.decode("UTF8"))
                ),
            ),
            _read_stream(
                process.stderr,
                lambda x: print(
                    "STDERR: {}".format(x.decode("UTF8"))
                ),
            ),
        ]
    )

    await process.wait()


async def main():
    await run("docker build -t my-docker-image:latest .")


if __name__ == "__main__":
    loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
    loop.run_until_complete(main())

Answer 5

p = subprocess.Popen(cmd, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, bufsize=1)
for line in iter(p.stdout.readline, b''):
    print line,
p.stdout.close()
p.wait()

Answer 6

I ran into the same problem awhile back. My solution was to ditch iterating for the read method, which will return immediately even if your subprocess isn't finished executing, etc.