Python: subprocess.Popen never returns

Question

I have written a Python script which runs some svn commands using subprocess.Popen. For example:

svn ls svn+ssh://url1/trunk
svn cp svn+ssh://url1/trunk svn+ssh://url1/branch/1 --parents -m "blah"

For each command, I create an subprocess.Popen object:

p = subprocesp.Popen(cmd, shell=True, stdout=sp.PIPE, stderr=sp.STDOUT)

And wait for it to finish:

output      = p.communicate()[0].strip()
return_code = p.returncode

The problem is that for some svn cp commands that fail immediately on the shell for copying inexistent repos, p.communicate() never returns.

Extra information:

• The code is executed using a thread pool (multiprocessing.pool.ThreadPool)
• The phenomena is menifested only for failing
• Using a shell, the exact same command finishes with error code 1 in less than two seconds.

Any idea what am I missing here?

Answer 1

Oddly enough, the problem was Eclipse. The script works perfectly well from the shell, but waits forever in the internal Eclipse terminal.