George Sakkis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On May 15, 5:30 am, Nick Craig-Wood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> George Sakkis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>> I'm trying to figure out why Popen captures the stderr of a specific >>> command when it runs through the shell but not without it. IOW: >>> cmd = [my_exe, arg1, arg2, ..., argN] >>> if 1: # this captures both stdout and stderr as expected >>> pipe = Popen(' '.join(cmd), shell=True, stderr=PIPE, stdout=PIPE) >>> else: # this captures only stdout >>> pipe = Popen(cmd, shell=False, stderr=PIPE, stdout=PIPE) >>> # this prints the empty string if not run through the shell >>> print "stderr:", pipe.stderr.read() >>> # this prints correctly in both cases >>> print "stdout:", pipe.stdout.read() >>> Any hints ? >> Post an example which replicates the problem! > I would, but the specific executable being spawned is not a python > script, it's a compiled binary (it's not an extension module either; > it's totally unrelated to python). I don't claim there is a bug or > anything suspicious about Popen, but rather I'd like an explanation of > how can a program display different behavior depending on whether it > runs through the shell or not. > George Well, I would try inspecting your environment ... in the shell and from within your Python process. See if there's anything there. If run a command via an interactive shell and it behaves differently when run via Popen then see if perhaps it's doing something like checking to see if it's stdin, or stdout are TTYs (using the C library functions like isatty() for example). You might try running the program under a Pexpect rather than SubProcess (since Pexpect will run the process with it's std* descriptors connected to pty devices). Alternatively try running the program in a shell pipeline to see if it behaves more like you're seeing when you run it under Python. (Since running it in the middle of a pipeline, perhaps with 2>&1 as well, is ensuring that all of the std* descriptors are connected to pipes. (You could also run with 2>/tmp/some.FIFO after doing a mknod p /tmp/some.FIFO (Linux) or mkfifo /tmp/some.FIFO (BSD) to create the named pipe, of course). If none of that worked ... try running the program under stace, truss, ktrace or whatever system call tracing facility your OS provides ... or under gdb. -- Jim Dennis, Starshine: Signed, Sealed, Delivered -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list