Question

I am getting unexpected behaviour using popen3, which I want to use to run a command like tool ala cmd < file1 > file2. The below example hangs, so that stdout done is never reached. Using other tools than cat may cause hanging, so that stdin done is never reached. I suspect, I am suffering from buffering, but how do I fix this?

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'open3'

Open3.popen3("cat") do |stdin, stdout, stderr, wait_thr|
  stdin.puts "foobar"

  puts "stdin done"

  stdout.each_line { |line| puts line }

  puts "stdout done"

  puts wait_thr.value
end

puts "all done"

Answer 1

stdout.each_line is waiting for further output from cat because cat‘s output stream is still open. It’s still open because cat is still waiting for input from the user because its input stream hasn’t been closed yet (you’ll notice that when you open cat in a terminal and type in foobar, it will still be running and waiting for input until you press ^d to close the stream).

So to fix this, simply call stdin.close before you print the output.