asyncpipe 0.0.1

asyncpipe

This is a little module to help you chain together subprocess pipelines, a bit more nicely than python natively lets you. The key element here is the support for asyncio.

OS Compatibility

This will only work on versions of python that support async/await syntax I've only tested this on Linux. I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work on OSX/BSD, but it's possible. I doubt this works on Windows at all.

Python compatibility

This requires 'async' and 'await' keywords, so Python 3.5+ only.

Motivation

When you use a PIPE for stdout in the native asyncio.subprocess module, you don't get back a value that can be passed to another Popen like you do in the subprocess module. Instead you get a wrapper. Sometimes you can resolve that by just using the 'shell' execution model, but sometimes that's not a great fit.

The solution is to do an error-prone set of operations with os.pipe and linking up various subprocesses stdin/stdout. This gets especially ugly when you've got a chain of 3+ shell commands.

Use

Synchronous

The synchronous form is pretty straightforward:

import asyncpipe
pipe = asyncpipe.PipeBuilder('ls')
# you can chain it
pipe.chain('grep', '^S')
# or use the 'or' operator
pipe | 'wc -l'
results = pipe.call()
matches = int(results[-1].stdout.strip())

All of those return the underlying object, and the starting arguments are optional, so this is equivalent:

import asyncpipe
pipe = asyncpipe.PipeBuilder().chain('ls') | 'grep ^s' | ['wc' '-l']
results = pipe.call()
matches = int(results[-1].stdout.strip())

Asyncronous

Async code is similar, except you need to pass the event loop as the 'loop' value to the PipeBuilder, or set it any time before calling call_async():

import asyncpipe
import asyncio
loop = asyncio.new_event_loop()
# if you don't do this, you will get errors from asyncio 
asyncio.set_event_loop(loop)
pipe = asyncpipe.PipeBuilder(loop=loop)
pipe.chain('ls') | 'grep ^s' | ['wc' '-l']
results = loop.run_until_complete(pipe.call_async())
matches = int(results[-1].stdout.strip())

If you were doing more in your event loop, you would of course just await pipe.call_async()!