Python using STDIN in child Process

Question

So I have a program, in the "main" process I fire off a new Process object which (what I want) is to read lines from stdin and append them to a Queue object.

Essentially the basic system setup is that there is a "command getting" process which the user will enter commands/queries, and I need to get those queries to other subsystems running in separate processes. My thinking is to share these via a multiprocessing.Queue which the other systems can read from.

What I have (focusing on just the getting the commands/queries) is basically:

def sub_proc(q):
    some_str = ""
    while True:
        some_str = raw_input("> ")
        if some_str.lower() == "quit":
            return
        q.put_nowait(some_str)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    q = Queue()
    qproc = Process(target=sub_proc, args=(q,))
    qproc.start()
    qproc.join()

    # now at this point q should contain all the strings entered by the user

The problem is that I get:

Process Process-1:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/multiprocessing/process.py", line 258, in _bootstrap
    self.run()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/multiprocessing/process.py", line 114, in run
    self._target(*self._args, **self._kwargs)
  File "/home/blah/blah/blah/blah.py", line 325, in sub_proc
    some_str = raw_input("> ")
  File "/randompathhere/eclipse/plugins/org.python.pydev_2.1.0.2011052613/PySrc/pydev_sitecustomize/sitecustomize.py", line 181, in raw_input
    ret = original_raw_input(prompt)
EOFError: EOF when reading a line

How do?

Answer 1

I solved a similar issue by passing the original stdin file descriptor to the child process and re-opening it there.

def sub_proc(q,fileno):
    sys.stdin = os.fdopen(fileno)  #open stdin in this process
    some_str = ""
    while True:
        some_str = raw_input("> ")

        if some_str.lower() == "quit":
            return
        q.put_nowait(some_str)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    q = Queue()
    fn = sys.stdin.fileno() #get original file descriptor
    qproc = Process(target=sub_proc, args=(q,fn))
    qproc.start()
    qproc.join()

This worked for my relatively simple case. I was even able to use the readline module on the re-opened stream. I don't know how robust it is for more complex systems.

Answer 2

In short, the main process and your second process don't share the same STDIN.

from multiprocessing import Process, Queue
import sys

def sub_proc():
    print sys.stdin.fileno()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    print sys.stdin.fileno()
    qproc = Process(target=sub_proc)
    qproc.start()
    qproc.join()

Run that and you should get two different results for sys.stdin.fileno()

Unfortunately, that doesn't solve your problem. What are you trying to do?