hey folks, A simple question hopefully. despite all my searching I have not found a satisfactory response.
The goal. Interact with a command line program. Simple enough, but the key is INTERACT. I tried the shell and comand approaches but that initiates, it does not allow interaction with the programs. So then I went with Popen and such... which then led to the subprocess module. I can create the object and read a few lines of output. but if I go too far then the program hangs. the number of lines will differ depandening on many function including the format of an input file so I can;t hardcode how many lines to read. I want to read all of STDOUT without failing because I went out of range. next I want to read the final line of the output because it tells me what is required for the next line of input. I am supposed to be able to entre 'y' and return for the program to continue if I agree with what I see in the stdout. A problem exists though that I have tried 'y' 'y\n' 'y\r' and nothing seems to get the program going again for I still cant; read past the same point in the standard output. then I have to kill and start over. So the next approach included looking at Pexpect, which got realy confusing realy fast and despite running fedora core and python 2.4.4 I would like my application to be cross platform and there is no Pexpect for Windows That I can see. I have checked out many mailing lists and posts and tutorials but they all admit to not be samples of complex interactivity. I guess I am having that special case. ASPN Python cookbok provided some code for a new Popen Class that allows for interaction but I don't think I need to go that root.... I am essentialy trying to build and Python wrapper for a coomand line program that i want to build a GUI around. Any links or suggestions would be great. Unfortunaetly I don't understand that abstract concepts in the manual reference. I am fresh in the python world and find examples better than technical abstracts. Cheers -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
