Subprocess.poll() falsely returns a value

Question

test1.py:

process = Popen(["python","test2.py"])
time.sleep(3)

alive = process.poll()
if alive is None:
    print "Still running"
else:
    print "Not running\r\n"
    print "%r" % alive

test1.py Output:

Not running
2

test2.py:

time.sleep(30)
print "done"

What is going on? Shouldn't this return "Still running"?

---

Because of a contradicting result here's the full test1.py code:

import cStringIO
import os
import cgi
import time
from subprocess import Popen

def application(environ, start_response):
    headers = []
    headers.append(('Content-Type', 'text/plain'))
    write = start_response('200 OK', headers)

    input = environ['wsgi.input']
    output = cStringIO.StringIO()

    process = Popen(["python","test2.py"])
    time.sleep(3)

    alive = process.poll()
    if alive is None:
        print >> output, "Still running"
    else:
        print >> output, "Not running\r\n"
        print >> output, "%r" % alive

    output.write(input.read(int(environ.get('CONTENT_LENGTH', '0'))))
    return [output.getvalue()]

---

Updated test1.py:

process = Popen(["python","C:/wamp/www/python/popen/test2.py"], shell=True)
    time.sleep(5)

    alive = process.poll()
    if alive is None:
        #print >> output, "%r" % alive
        print >> output, "Still running"
    else:
        print >> output, "Not running"
        print >> output, "%r" % alive
        print >> output, "Current working dir : %s" % os.getcwd()
        print >> output, os.strerror(0)

Updated Output:

Not running
0
Current working dir : C:\wamp\bin\apache\apache2.2.22
No error

Answer 1

If Popen() cannot find test2.py, it produces the error "No such file or directory", with errno 2. This error number is returned by poll(). Since you seem to be running this script through wsgi, something seems to be gulping your stderr and you don't see the error message:

$ cat test1.py
from subprocess import Popen
import time

process = Popen(["python","doesnotexist.py"])
time.sleep(3)

alive = process.poll()
if alive is None:
    print "Still running"
else:
    print "Not running\r\n"
    print "%r" % alive
$ python test1.py 
python: can't open file 'doesnotexist.py': [Errno 2] No such file or directory
Not running

2

Now, the issue is probably because your current working directory of your script is not set to the script's directory by the front end server, try printing os.getcwd() to see if it's what you're expecting.