piping together several subprocesses

Question

I have 5 processes p1,p2,...,p5 where I want to write some data to stdin of p1, pipe p1 output to p2 stdin and finally read the final result from output of p5.<

Answer 1

Maybe this can help:

import sys
import tempfile
from subprocess import Popen, PIPE


cmd = [sys.executable, '-c', 'print raw_input()']

# Using a temp file to give input data to the subprocess instead of stdin.write to avoid deadlocks.
with tempfile.TemporaryFile() as f:
    f.write('foobar')
    f.seek(0)  # Return at the start of the file so that the subprocess p1 can read what we wrote.
    p1 = Popen(cmd, stdin=f, stdout=PIPE)

p2 = Popen(cmd, stdin=p1.stdout, stdout=PIPE)
p3 = Popen(cmd, stdin=p2.stdout, stdout=PIPE)

# No order needed.
p1.stdout.close()
p2.stdout.close()

# Using communicate() instead of stdout.read to avoid deadlocks. 
print p3.communicate()[0]

Output:

$ python test.py
foobar

Hope this can be hepfull.