Ptyprocess¶
Launch a subprocess in a pseudo terminal (pty), and interact with both the process and its pty.
Sometimes, piping stdin and stdout is not enough. There might be a password prompt that doesn’t read from stdin, output that changes when it’s going to a pipe rather than a terminal, or curses-style interfaces that rely on a terminal. If you need to automate these things, running the process in a pseudo terminal (pty) is the answer.
Interface:
from ptyprocess import PtyProcessUnicode
p = PtyProcessUnicode.spawn(['python'])
p.read(20)
p.write('6+6\n')
p.read(20)
Contents:
What is a pty?¶
A pty is a kernel-level object which processes can write data to and read data from, a bit like a pipe.
Unlike a pipe, data moves through a single pty in both directions. When you use
a program in a shell pipeline, or with subprocess.Popen
in Python, up
to three pipes are created for the process’s standard streams (stdin, stdout
and stderr). When you run a program using ptyprocess, all three of its standard
streams are connected to a single pty:
A pty also does more than a pipe. It keeps track of the window size (rows and
columns of characters) and notifies child processes (with a SIGWINCH signal)
when it changes. In cooked mode, it does some processing of data sent from the
parent process, so for instance the byte 03
(entered as Ctrl-C) will cause
SIGINT to be sent to the child process.
Many command line programs behave differently if they detect that stdin or stdout
is connected to a terminal instead of a pipe (using
isatty()), because this normally means
that they’re being used interactively by a human user.
They may format output differently (e.g. ls
lists files in columns)
or prompt the user to confirm actions.
When you run these programs in ptyprocess, they will exhibit their ‘interactive’
behaviour, instead of the ‘pipe’ behaviour you’ll see using Popen()
.
See also
- The TTY demystified
- Detailed article by Linus Akesson