On Jun 10, 6:52 am, Nobody <nob...@nowhere.com> wrote: > Without the p1.stdout.close(), if the reader (grep) terminates before > consuming all of its input, the writer (ls) won't terminate so long as > Python retains the descriptor corresponding to p1.stdout. In this > situation, the p1.wait() will deadlock. > > The communicate() method wait()s for the process to terminate. Other > processes need to be wait()ed on explicitly, otherwise you end up with > "zombies" (labelled "<defunct>" in the output from "ps").
You are obviously very wise on such things. I'm curious if this deadlock issue is a rare event since I'm grep (hopefully) would rarely terminate before consuming all its input. Even if zombies are created, they will eventually get dealt with my OS w/o any user intervention needed right? I'm just trying to verify the naive solution of not worrying about these deadlock will still be ok and handled adequately by os. :) cs -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
