Popen.communicate(input=None, timeout=None)
Interact with process: Send data to stdin. Read data from stdout and stderr, until end-of-file is reached. Wait for process to terminate. The optional input argument should be data to be sent to the child process, or None
, if no data should be sent to the child. The type of input must be bytes or, if universal_newlines was True
, a string.
communicate()
returns a tuple (stdout_data, stderr_data)
. The data will be bytes or, if universal_newlines was True
, strings.
Note that if you want to send data to the process’s stdin, you need to create the Popen object with stdin=PIPE
. Similarly, to get anything other than None
in the result tuple, you need to give stdout=PIPE
and/or stderr=PIPE
too.
If the process does not terminate after timeout seconds, a TimeoutExpired
exception will be raised. Catching this exception and retrying communication will not lose any output.
The child process is not killed if the timeout expires, so in order to cleanup properly a well-behaved application should kill the child process and finish communication:
proc = subprocess.Popen(...) try: outs, errs = proc.communicate(timeout=15) except TimeoutExpired: proc.kill() outs, errs = proc.communicate()
Note
The data read is buffered in memory, so do not use this method if the data size is large or unlimited.
Changed in version 3.3: timeout was added.
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