Question

On a server I have a C++ program which takes some input and writes some output to a file. After the file is generated, I want to send an email to a person with the corresponding link to the file.

I’d rather avoid dealing with SMTP from C++ itself, so I thought about having C++ using a system call to execute a python script, which would in turn handle the emailing process.

In C++:

system("python emailer.py [e-mail] filetodownload.txt");

In Python:

import sys
email = sys.argv[1]
file = sys.argv[2]
// handle SMTP emailing...

I have a question about this simple approach. The C++ program is multithreaded, so there may be more than one thread wanting to call the python script to send an email. Is this a concern? Would one (again simple) solution be having a mutex variable in the C++ program which allows only one thread to call the python script at a time? Also, if there are better ways to go about accomplishing this task please let me know.

Answer 1

From what you’ve shown I don’t see any shared resource that would require any multi-threaded synchronisation. Each system call to python will result in a separate process.