So I have this part of code which does a simple thing : it launches a script and while the script is processing, a throbber is set on.
def go(self):
if ui.chk.isChecked():
self.startThrobber()
script = subprocess.check_call(r'"C:\Program Files\FME\fme.exe"', shell=False)
if script == 0:
self.stopThrobber() # opens a QMessageBox and stops throbber
else:
QMessageBox.information(self.popup(), "Errpr", "Error !")
After trying different methods (QThread, subprocess.Popen ...) this is the closest i got to make it work.
The only thing that doesn't work is that the throbber doesn't start right before the subprocess is executed, it starts after and thus it never stops.
So why is the throbber not ending when stopThrobber() is executed ?
And why is startThrobber not being executed before the subprocess (i'm pretty sure it's a subprocess thing, but i'm pretty new to all this, never heard about thread until yesterday)
EDIT :
The single quote was just a typing error, sorry. Still doesn't fix the problem.
Any call to a subprocess, from your main thread, that is blocking (waits for return) is going to stop your throbber from working properly. My answer to your other SO question on this topic outlines an approach that does not cause the subprocess call to block the main thread. I should point out that solution is not the only way to create a non-blocking call to a subprocess (for instance see here. You could create a QTimer to poll the subprocess poll() method periodically so that you can check the returncode to see if the subprocess has finished.)
The key theme is that you need your methods that run in the main thread to return quickly in order to keep the GUI responsive and allow your throbber to run/animate. So choose a way to launch the subprocess that meets this requirement.
Your single quotes denoting the raw string enclose the 'shell' argument.
def go(self):
if ui.chk.isChecked():
self.startThrobber()
script = subprocess.check_call(r"C:\Program Files\FME\fme.exe", shell=False)
if script == 0:
self.stopThrobber() # opens a QMessageBox and stops throbber
else:
QMessageBox.information(self.popup(), "Errpr", "Error !")
So I've tried another thing (unsuccessfully..)
When I click on a button, it executes startThrobber() and sends a signal to the following function :
def go(self):
self.startThrobber()
script = subprocess.Popen(r'"C:\Program Files\FME\fme.exe" ', shell=False)
while script.poll() == None:
time.sleep(1)
else:
p.stopThrobber()
But still doesn't working.. startThrobber is executed but nothing appears on the GUI... I thougth that the point of subprocess was to allow to do multiple tasks simultaneously so why isn't the throbber appearing ?
UPDATE : if i erase the while loop, startThrobber works : it appears while the subprocess is turning. So why when there is the while loop it doesn't work ?!
Related
I am learning the subprocess module in python, and to my understanding, the wait method, blocks the thread from executing the rest of the code until the launched process is closed. But when I cann the wait method it still executes the rest of the code:
def startCalc():
x = subprocess.Popen('C:\\Windows\\System32\\calc.exe')
time.sleep(5)
x.wait()
print('finished waiting')
print(x.poll())
print(x.wait())
startCalc()
If I am not wrong, the "finished waiting statement, would not appear in the output until I close the calculator, but it does.
Where am I wrong?
The problem isn't with your code, but rather with the calc.exe executable. It starts the calculator and returns immediately with 0 exit status. So, from the perspective of your program, the process ran to completion successfully. As far as I know, calc.exe doesn't have a way to launch in attached mode.
Test this by opening a powershell, or cmd terminal and launching calc.exe. You get the prompt back immediately.
I am not familiar with the ".wait" function, but if you want your code to wait for the execution of the "calc.exe" process, you could replace "Popen" with "call":
x = subprocess.call('C:\\Windows\\System32\\calc.exe')
While making an HTML help tool in Python, I wanted to exit the program smoothly, like clicking the X button on Google Chrome. But, I encountered an issue. It asks me if I want to kill the program, instead of doing it automatically.
I tried using quit(), exit() and sys.exit(). All do the same thing. How can I get the program to exit smoothly?
As it was suggested in the comments, your problem should only be noticed inside Python's IDLE, but should run just fine when executed inside a terminal. However, this code should also kill your program in IDLE:
import os, signal
from time import sleep
print("I will sleep for 3 secs and shut down!")
sleep(3)
os.kill(os.getpid(), signal.SIGTERM)
This sends a signal to your application to terminate.
Or alternatively you could call os' _exit function.
From the docs:
Exit the process with status n, without calling cleanup handlers, flushing stdio buffers, etc.
I know it's late but I took a different way.
It might be a dirty way of doing it. I don't like the accepted
answer because you have to hardcode those lines in every script.
I just comment out the lines, so that the dialog never shows on screen.
You can find the file /usr/lib/python3.9/idlelib/pyshell.py
aprx: line 1007
def close(self):
"Extend EditorWindow.close()"
#if self.executing:
#response = messagebox.askokcancel(
#"Kill?",
#"Your program is still running!\n Do you want to kill it?",
#default="ok",
#parent=self.text)
#if response is False:
#return "cancel"
self.stop_readline()
self.canceled = True
self.closing = True
return EditorWindow.close(self)
That way it will never ask you this silly question "Your program is still running!\n Do you want to kill it?"
Update 2: So I piped the output of stderr and it looks like when I include shell=True, i just get the help file for omx player (it lists all the command line switches and such). Is it possible that shell=True might not play nicely with omxplayer?
Update: I came across that link before but it failed on me so I moved on without digging deeper. After Tshepang suggested it again I looked into it further. I have two problems, and I'm hoping the first is caused by the second. The first problem is that when I include shell=True as an arg, the video never plays. If I don't include it, the video plays, but is not ever killed. Updated code below.
So I am trying to write a python app for my raspberry pi that plays a video on a loop (I came across Popen as a good way to accomplish this using OMXplayer) and then on keyboard interrupt, it kills that process and opens another process (playing a different video). My eventual goal is to be able to use vid1 as a sort of "screensaver" and have vid2 play when a user interacts with the system, but for now im simply trying to kill vid1 on keyboard input and running into quite the hard time doing it. I'm hoping someone can tell me where my code is falling down.
Forewarning that I'm extremely new to Python, and linux based systems in general, so if im doing this terribly wrong, please feel free to redirect me, but this seemed to be the fastest way to get there.
Here is my code as it stands:
import subprocess
import os
import signal
vid1 = ['omxplayer', '--loop', '/home/pi/Vids/2779832.mp4']
while True:
#vid = subprocess.Popen(['omxplayer', '--loop', '/home/pi/Vids/2779832.mp4'], stdout=subprocess.PIPE, shell=True, preexec_fn=os.setsid)
vid = subprocess.Popen(vid1, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, preexec_fn=os.setsid)
print 'SID is: ', preexec_fn
#vid = subprocess.Popen(['omxplayer', '--loop', '/home/pi/Vids/2779832.mp4'])
id = raw_input()
if not id:
break
os.killpg(vid.pid, signal.SIGTERM)
print "your input: ", id
print "While loop has exited"
So I am trying to write a python app for my raspberry pi that plays a video on a loop (I came across Popen as a good way to accomplish this using OMXplayer) and then on keyboard interrupt, it kills that process and opens another process (playing a different video).
By default, SIGINT is propagated to all processes in the foreground process group, see "How Ctrl+C works". preexec_fn=os.setsid (or os.setpgrp) actually prevents it: use it only if you do not want omxplayer to receive Ctrl+C i.e., use it if you manually call os.killpg when you need to kill a process tree (assuming omxplayer children do not change their process group).
"keyboard interrupt" (sigint signal) is visible as KeyboardInterrupt exception in Python. Your code should catch it:
#!/usr/bin/env python
from subprocess import call, check_call
try:
rc = call(['omxplayer', 'first file'])
except KeyboardInterrupt:
check_call(['omxplayer', 'second file'])
else:
if rc != 0:
raise RuntimeError('omxplayer failed to play the first file, '
'return code: %d' % rc)
The above assumes that omxplayer exits on Ctrl+C.
You could see the help message due to several reasons e.g., omxplayer does not support --loop option (run it manually to check) or you mistakenly use shell=True and pass the command as a list: always pass the command as a single string if you need shell=True and in reverse: always (on POSIX) pass the command as a list of arguments if shell=False (default).
I am using the multiprocessing module in python to launch few processes in parallel. These processes are independent of each other. They generate their own output and write out the results in different files. Each process calls an external tool using the subprocess.call method.
It was working fine until I discovered an issue in the external tool where due to some error condition it goes into a 'prompt' mode and waits for the user input. Now in my python script I use the join method to wait till all the processes finish their tasks. This is causing the whole thing to wait for this erroneous subprocess call. I can put a timeout for each of the process but I do not know in advance how long each one is going to run and hence this option is ruled out.
How do I figure out if any child process is waiting for an user input and how do I send an 'exit' command to it? Any pointers or suggestions to relevant modules in python will be really appreciated.
My code here:
import subprocess
import sys
import os
import multiprocessing
def write_script(fname,e):
f = open(fname,'w')
f.write("Some useful cammnd calling external tool")
f.close()
subprocess.call(['chmod','+x',os.path.abspath(fname)])
return os.path.abspath(fname)
def run_use(mname,script):
print "ssh "+mname+" "+script
subprocess.call(['ssh',mname,script])
if __name__ == '__main__':
dict1 = {}
dict['mod1'] = ['pp1','ext2','les3','pw4']
dict['mod2'] = ['aaa','bbb','ccc','ddd']
machines = ['machine1','machine2','machine3','machine4']
log_file.write(str(dict1.keys()))
for key in dict1.keys():
arr = []
for mod in dict1[key]:
d = {}
arr.append(mod)
if ((mod == dict1[key][-1]) | (len(arr)%4 == 0)):
for i in range(0,len(arr)):
e = arr.pop()
script = write_script(e+"_temp.sh",e)
d[i] = multiprocessing.Process(target=run_use,args=(machines[i],script,))
d[i].daemon = True
for pp in d:
d[pp].start()
for pp in d:
d[pp].join()
Since you're writing a shell script to run your subcommands, can you simply tell them to read input from /dev/null?
#!/bin/bash
# ...
my_other_command -a -b arg1 arg2 < /dev/null
# ...
This may stop them blocking on input and is a really simple solution. If this doesn't work for you, read on for some other options.
The subprocess.call() function is simply shorthand for constructing a subprocess.Popen instance and then calling the wait() method on it. So, your spare processes could instead create their own subprocess.Popen instances and poll them with poll() method on the object instead of wait() (in a loop with a suitable delay). This leaves them free to remain in communication with the main process so you can, for example, allow the main process to tell the child process to terminate the Popen instance with the terminate() or kill() methods and then itself exit.
So, the question is how does the child process tell whether the subprocess is awaiting user input, and that's a trickier question. I would say perhaps the easiest approach is to monitor the output of the subprocess and search for the user input prompt, assuming that it always uses some string that you can look for. Alternatively, if the subprocess is expected to generate output continually then you could simply look for any output and if a configured amount of time goes past without any output then you declare that process dead and terminate it as detailed above.
Since you're reading the output, actually you don't need poll() or wait() - the process closing its output file descriptor is good enough to know that it's terminated in this case.
Here's an example of a modified run_use() method which watches the output of the subprocess:
def run_use(mname,script):
print "ssh "+mname+" "+script
proc = subprocess.Popen(['ssh',mname,script], stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
for line in proc.stdout:
if "UserPrompt>>>" in line:
proc.terminate()
break
In this example we assume that the process either gets hung on on UserPrompt>>> (replace with the appropriate string) or it terminates naturally. If it were to get stuck in an infinite loop, for example, then your script would still not terminate - you can only really address that with an overall timeout, but you didn't seem keen to do that. Hopefully your subprocess won't misbehave in that way, however.
Finally, if you don't know in advance the prompt that will be giving from your process then your job is rather harder. Effectively what you're asking to do is monitor an external process and know when it's blocked reading on a file descriptor, and I don't believe there's a particularly clean solution to this. You could consider running a process under strace or similar, but that's quite an awful hack and I really wouldn't recommend it. Things like strace are great for manual diagnostics, but they really shouldn't be part of a production setup.
I have the following python code:
os.system("C:/Python27/python.exe C:/GUI/TestGUI.py")
sys.exit(0)
It runs the command fine, and a window pops up. However, it doesn't exit the first script. It just stays there, and I eventually have to force kill the process. No errors are produced. What's going on?
instead of os.system use subprocess.Popen
this runs a command and doesn't wait for it and then exits:
import subprocess
import sys
subprocess.Popen(["mupdf", "/home/dan/Desktop/Sieve-JFP.pdf"])
sys.exit(0)
note that os.system(command) like:
p = subprocess.Popen(command)
p.wait()
KeyboardInterrupts and signals are only seen by the process (ie the main thread). If your nested command hangs due to some kind of file read or write block, you won't be able to quit the program using any keyboard commands.
Why does a read-only open of a named pipe block?
If you can't eliminate the source of the disk block, then one way is to wrap the process in the thread so you can force kill it. But if you do this, you leave opportunity for half-written and corrupted files on disk.
I suggest using os._exit instead of sys.exit, as sys.exit doesnt quit a program but raises exception level, or exits a thread. os._exit(-1) quits the entire program
import sys ,subprocess
subprocess.Popen(["C:/Python27/python.exe", "C:/GUI/TestGUI.py"])
sys.exit(0)
Popen from subprocess module what you are looking for.