drainers 0.0.1

Defining a process

A Drainer is a factory and controller wrapper around subprocess.Popen and therefore takes all of the (optional) parameters that subprocess.Popen’s initializer takes. For example, the minimal Drainer takes a command array:

from drainers import Drainer

def ignore_event(line, is_err):
        pass

my_drainer = Drainer(['ls', '-la'], read_event_cb=ignore_event)
my_drainer.start()

But, extra arguments are allowed, too:

my_drainer = Drainer(['echo', '$JAVA_HOME'], shell=True, bufsize=64,
                                         read_event_cb=ignore_event)
my_drainer.start()

The only two arguments to Drainer that are reserved are stdout and stderr. Drainer requires them to be subprocess.PIPE explicitly, and sets them for you accordingly.

Defining a callback

Drainer’s strength lies in the fact that each line that is read from the process’ standard output or standard error streams leads to a callback function being invoked. This allows you to process virtually any process’ output, as long as it’s line-based.

The callback function can be specified using the read_event_cb parameter to the constructor, as seen in the example above. It is mandatory. The callback function specified needs to have a specific signature:

def my_callback(line, is_err):
        ...

It should take two parameters: line (a string) and is_err (a boolean). The latter indicates that the line is read from the standard error stream. There is nothing more to it. It does not need to return anything: it’s return value will be ignored. Your callback may be a class method, too, like in the following example. Notice that in those cases, you pass foo.my_method as the value for the read_event_cb parameter:

class MyClass(object):

        def my_method(self, line, is_err):
                ...

foo = MyClass()
my_drainer = Drainer(['ls'], read_event_cb=foo.my_method)
my_drainer.start()

The granularity currently is a single line. If you want to read predefined chunks of data, please fork this repo and implement a Drainer subclass yourself. If you want a callback that isn’t invoked after each line read, but after an arbitrary time or amount of lines, you have to implement this yourself. (It shouldn’t be too hard, though. See the examples directory for inspiration.)

Aborting processes

Drainer allows you to abort a running process in the middle of execution, forcefully sending the process a terminate() message (Python equivalent of a Unix SIGTERM message) when a certain condition arises. By default, the process will never be terminated abnormally. To specify termination criteria, implement a callback function that takes no parameters and returns True if abortion is desired and False otherwise. For example, for a long running process you might want to terminate it if the disk is getting (almost) full. But checking how much space is free can be a lengthy operation, so you might want to do it only sparingly:

def out_of_diskspace():
        left = handytools.check_disk_free()
        total = handytools.check_disk_total()
        return (left / total) < 0.03

# The following drainer executes the cruncher and checks whether the disk
# is (almost) full every 5 seconds.  It aborts if free disk space runs
# under 3%.
my_drainer = Drainer(['/bin/crunch', 'inputfile', 'outputfile'],
                     read_event_cb=ignore_event,
                                         should_abort=out_of_diskspace,
                                         check_interval=5.0)
exitcode = my_drainer.start()

The example is pretty self-explaining. You can check the exitcode to see the result of the process.