Question

Is there a way in Python to do the equivalent of the UNIX command line tee? I’m doing a typical fork/exec pattern, and I’d like the stdout from the child to appear in both a log file and on the stdout of the parent simultaneously without requiring any buffering.

In this python code for instance, the stdout of the child ends up in the log file, but not in the stdout of the parent.

pid = os.fork()
logFile = open(path,"w")
if pid == 0:
  os.dup2(logFile.fileno(),1)  
  os.execv(cmd)

edit: I do not wish to use the subprocess module. I’m doing some complicated stuff with the child process that requires me call fork manually.

Answer 1

Here you have a working solution without using the subprocess module. Although, you could use it for the tee process while still using the exec* functions suite for your custom subprocess (just use stdin=subprocess.PIPE and then duplicate the descriptor to your stdout).

import os, time, sys

pr, pw = os.pipe()
pid = os.fork()

if pid == 0:
    os.close(pw)
    os.dup2(pr, sys.stdin.fileno())
    os.close(pr)
    os.execv('/usr/bin/tee', ['tee', 'log.txt'])
else:
    os.close(pr)
    os.dup2(pw, sys.stdout.fileno())
    os.close(pw)

    pid2 = os.fork()

    if pid2 == 0:
        # Replace with your custom process call
        os.execv('/usr/bin/yes', ['yes'])
    else:
        try:
            while True:
                time.sleep(1)
        except KeyboardInterrupt:
            pass

Note that the tee command, internally, does the same thing as Ben suggested in his answer: reading input and looping over output file descriptors while writing to them. It may be more efficient because of the optimized implementation and because it’s written in C, but you have the overhead of the different pipes (don’t know for sure which solution is more efficient, but in my opinion, reassigning a custom file-like object to stdout is a more elegant solution).

Some more resources:

• How do I duplicate sys.stdout to a log file in python?
• http://www.shallowsky.com/blog/programming/python-tee.html