Question

Is there a decoupled method of passing in a binary file without suffering the penalty of python having unbuffered stdout for the entire duration of running a program (if i intend to use only cmdline and not open(…,’rb’)? It seems like -u is the only way to read in a file as binary data (from cmdline)

http://docs.python.org/using/cmdline.html

-u Force stdin, stdout and stderr to be totally unbuffered. On systems where it matters, also put stdin, stdout and stderr in binary mode.

Answer 1

You could perhaps avoid Python’s file mode by instead grabbing the fileno out of the sys.stdin file-like object, and using os.read() to grab data from it?

import os
import sys

stdin_no = sys.stdin.fileno()
some_bytes = os.read(stdin_no, 1024)