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I have a python subprocess that runs an arbitrary C++ program (student assignments if it matters) via POpen. The structure is such that i write a series of inputs to stdin, at the end i read all of stdout and parse for responses to each output.

Of course given that these are student assignments, they may crash after certain inputs. What i require is to know after which specific input their program crashed.

So far i know that when a runtime exception is thrown in the C++ program, its printed to stderr. So right not i can read the stderr after the fact and see that it did in face crash. But i haven't found a way to read stderr while the program is still running, so that i can infer that the error is in response to the latest input. Every SO question or article that i have run into seems to make use of subprocess.communicate(), but communicate seems to block until the subprocess returns, this hasn't been working for me because i need to continue sending inputs to the program after the fact if it hasn't crashed.

Jemar Jones
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1 Answers1

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What i require is to know after which specific input their program crashed.

Call process.stdin.flush() after process.stdin.write(b'your input'). If the process is already dead then either .write() or .flush() will raise an exception (specific exception may depend on the system e.g, BrokenPipeError on POSIX).

Unrelated: If you are redirecting all three standard streams (stdin=PIPE, stdout=PIPE, stderr=PIPE) then make sure to consume stdout, stderr pipes concurrently while you are writing the input otherwise the child process may hang if it generates enough output to fill the OS pipe buffer. You could use threads, async. IO to do it -- code examples.

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jfs
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