Question

I have a program, P1, which I need to run about 24*20000 times with different inputs. The problem is the P1 hangs and I should force it to quite manually (kill). My first solution was writing a python script to call P1 and passing the proper input and receiving the output using popen and communicate. But due to the nature of communicate which waits for the output, I can not kill the process as long as it is waiting for the response. I am on Windows.

I tried to use multiprocess function, but it only runs the P1 and failed in sending the input to it. I am suspicious about not using pipes in popen and tried a little bit but I guess I can’t receive the output from P1.

Any ideas?

# This code run XLE and pass the intended input to it automatically
 def startExe(programPath, programArgStr):
 p = subprocess.Popen(programPath,stdout=subprocess.PIPE,stdin=subprocess.PIPE) p.stdin.write(programArgStr)
 p.communicate()[0]
# Need to kill the process if it takes longer than it should here

def main(folder): 
.. 
#loop
programArgStr = "create-parser"+path1+";cd "+ path2+"/s"+ command(counter) +";exit"

startExe(path, programArgStr)
..

As you can see if P1 can finish the given task successfully it can exit itself, using the exit commands passed to it!

Answer 1

I solved my problem by editing current code and putting the killer code in a separate file.
to do that I add a line to write PID of the newly created process in a file.

    #//Should come before p.commiunicate
    WriteStatus(str(p.pid) + "***" + str(gmtime().tm_hour) + "***" + str(gmtime().tm_min))        
    p.communicate()[0]

And the process monitor executed seperately and checks every 2 mins to see if the processes listed in the file are still active. If yes kill them and remove their ID.

 def KillProcess(pid):

    subprocess.Popen("TASKKILL /PID "+ str(pid) + " /F /T" , shell=True)
    subprocess.Popen("TASKKILL /im WerFault.exe /F /T" , shell=True)
    print "kill"

    def ReadStatus(filePath):
    print "Checking" + filePath
    try:
            status = open(mainPath+filePath, 'r').readline()
    except:
            print "file removed" + filePath
            return 0
    if len(status) >0:
            info = status.split("***")                
            time = [gmtime().tm_hour, gmtime().tm_min]
            print time

            # Time deifferences
            difHour = time[0]- int(info[1])
            if difHour == 0: # in the same hour
                    difMin =  time[1]- int(info[2])
            else:
                    difMin = 60 - int(info[2]) + time[1]
            if difMin > 2:
                    try:
                            open(mainPath+filePath, 'w').write("")
                            KillProcess(info[0])
                    except:
                            pass
    return 1

  def monitor():
    # Read all the files
    listFiles = os.listdir(mainPath)
    while len(listFiles)>0:
            #GO and check the contents
            for file in listFiles:
                    #Open the file and Calculate if the process should be killed or not
                    pid = ReadStatus(file)
                    #Update listFiles due to remove of file after finishing the process '
                    # of each folder is done
                    listFiles = os.listdir(mainPath)
            for i in range(0,4):
                    time.sleep(30) #waits 30 sec
                    subprocess.Popen("TASKKILL /im WerFault.exe /F /T" , shell=True)
    #to indicate the job is done
    return 1