I have a flag in my Python script which specifies whether I setup and use an external process or not. This process is a command called my_command and it takes data from standard input. If I was to run this on the command-line, it would be something like:
$ my_command < data > result
I want to use a Python script to generate lines of data by modifying standard input and feeding it to my_command.
I'm doing something like this:
import getopt, sys, os, stat, subprocess
# for argument's sake, let's say this is set to True for now
# in real life, I use getopt.getopt() to decide whether this is True or False
useProcess = True
if useProcess:
process = subprocess.Popen(['my_command'], stdin=subprocess.PIPE, stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
for line in sys.stdin:
# parse line from standard input and modify it
# we store the result in a variable called modified_line
modified_line = line + "foo"
# if we want to feed modified_line to my_command, do the following:
if useProcess:
process.stdin.write(modified_line)
# otherwise, we just print the modified line
else:
print modified_line
However, my_command behaves as if it does not receive any data and quits with an error state. What am I doing wrong?
EDIT
Let's say my Python script is called my_Python_script. Let's say I would normally pass my_command a file called data over standard input:
$ my_command < data > result
But now I'm passing it to my_Python_script instead:
$ my_Python_script < data > some_other_result
I want my_Python_script to conditionally set up a subprocess that runs my_command on the contents of data (which are modified by my_Pyt