Realtime output from a shell command in Python

Running a shell command in Python usually waits until the process is finished and only then sends its entire output. In the following example it is process.communicate() that blocks till given command is completed.

import subprocess import shlex

command = shlex.split("ping -c 5 google.com") process = subprocess.Popen(command, stdout=subprocess.PIPE) output, err = process.communicate() print output

subprocess module allows to capture realtime output as well - here's how:

from subprocess import Popen, PIPE

def run(command): process = Popen(command, stdout=PIPE, shell=True) while True: line = process.stdout.readline().rstrip() if not line: break yield line

if name == "main": for path in run("ping -c 5 google.com"): print path