Develop Reference

Unable to stop subprocess fully in python [duplicate]

I'm launching a subprocess with the following command:
p = subprocess.Popen(cmd, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, shell=True)
However, when I try to kill using:
p.terminate()
or
p.kill()
The command keeps running in the background, so I was wondering how can I actually terminate the process.
Note that when I run the command with:
p = subprocess.Popen(cmd.split(), stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
It does terminate successfully when issuing the p.terminate().

Use a process group so as to enable sending a signal to all the process in the groups. For that, you should attach a session id to the parent process of the spawned/child processes, which is a shell in your case. This will make it the group leader of the processes. So now, when a signal is sent to the process group leader, it's transmitted to all of the child processes of this group.
Here's the code:
import os
import signal
import subprocess
# The os.setsid() is passed in the argument preexec_fn so
# it's run after the fork() and before exec() to run the shell.
pro = subprocess.Popen(cmd, stdout=subprocess.PIPE,
shell=True, preexec_fn=os.setsid)
os.killpg(os.getpgid(pro.pid), signal.SIGTERM) # Send the signal to all the process groups

p = subprocess.Popen(cmd, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, shell=True)
p.kill()
p.kill() ends up killing the shell process and cmd is still running.
I found a convenient fix this by:
p = subprocess.Popen("exec " + cmd, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, shell=True)
This will cause cmd to inherit the shell process, instead of having the shell launch a child process, which does not get killed. p.pid will be the id of your cmd process then.
p.kill() should work.
I don't know what effect this will have on your pipe though.

If you can use psutil, then this works perfectly:
import subprocess
import psutil
def kill(proc_pid):
process = psutil.Process(proc_pid)
for proc in process.children(recursive=True):
proc.kill()
process.kill()
proc = subprocess.Popen(["infinite_app", "param"], shell=True)
try:
proc.wait(timeout=3)
except subprocess.TimeoutExpired:
kill(proc.pid)

I could do it using
from subprocess import Popen
process = Popen(command, shell=True)
Popen("TASKKILL /F /PID {pid} /T".format(pid=process.pid))
it killed the cmd.exe and the program that i gave the command for.
(On Windows)

When shell=True the shell is the child process, and the commands are its children. So any SIGTERM or SIGKILL will kill the shell but not its child processes, and I don't remember a good way to do it.
The best way I can think of is to use shell=False, otherwise when you kill the parent shell process, it will leave a defunct shell process.

None of these answers worked for me so Im leaving the code that did work. In my case even after killing the process with .kill() and getting a .poll() return code the process didn't terminate.
Following the subprocess.Popen documentation:
"...in order to cleanup properly a well-behaved application should kill the child process and finish communication..."
proc = subprocess.Popen(...)
try:
outs, errs = proc.communicate(timeout=15)
except TimeoutExpired:
proc.kill()
outs, errs = proc.communicate()
In my case I was missing the proc.communicate() after calling proc.kill(). This cleans the process stdin, stdout ... and does terminate the process.

As Sai said, the shell is the child, so signals are intercepted by it -- best way I've found is to use shell=False and use shlex to split the command line:
if isinstance(command, unicode):
cmd = command.encode('utf8')
args = shlex.split(cmd)
p = subprocess.Popen(args, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.STDOUT)
Then p.kill() and p.terminate() should work how you expect.

Send the signal to all the processes in group
self.proc = Popen(commands,
stdout=PIPE,
stderr=STDOUT,
universal_newlines=True,
preexec_fn=os.setsid)
os.killpg(os.getpgid(self.proc.pid), signal.SIGHUP)
os.killpg(os.getpgid(self.proc.pid), signal.SIGTERM)

There is a very simple way for Python 3.5 or + (Actually tested on Python 3.8)
import subprocess, signal, time
p = subprocess.Popen(['cmd'], shell=True)
time.sleep(5) #Wait 5 secs before killing
p.send_signal(signal.CTRL_C_EVENT)
Then, your code may crash at some point if you have a keyboard input detection, or sth like this. In this case, on the line of code/function where the error is given, just use:
try:
FailingCode #here goes the code which is raising KeyboardInterrupt
except KeyboardInterrupt:
pass
What this code is doing is just sending a "CTRL+C" signal to the running process, what will cause the process to get killed.

Solution that worked for me
if os.name == 'nt': # windows
subprocess.Popen("TASKKILL /F /PID {pid} /T".format(pid=process.pid))
else:
os.kill(process.pid, signal.SIGTERM)

Full blown solution that will kill running process (including subtree) on timeout reached or specific conditions via a callback function.
Works both on windows & Linux, from Python 2.7 up to 3.10 as of this writing.
Install with pip install command_runner
Example for timeout:
from command_runner import command_runner
# Kills ping after 2 seconds
exit_code, output = command_runner('ping 127.0.0.1', shell=True, timeout=2)
Example for specific condition:
Here we'll stop ping if current system time seconds digit is > 5
from time import time
from command_runner import command_runner
def my_condition():
# Arbitrary condition for demo
return True if int(str(int(time()))[-1]) > 5
# Calls my_condition() every second (check_interval) and kills ping if my_condition() returns True
exit_code, output = command_runner('ping 127.0.0.1', shell=True, stop_on=my_condition, check_interval=1)

Precarious Popen Piping

I want to use subprocess.Popen to run a process, with the following requirements.
I want to pipe the stdout and stderr back to the caller of Popen as the process runs.
I want to kill the process after timeout seconds if it is still running.
I have come to the conclusion that a flaw in the subprocess API means it cannot fulfill these two requirements at the same time. Consider the following toy programs:
chatty.py
while True:
print 'Hi'
silence.py
while True:
pass
caller.py
import subprocess
import time
def go(command, timeout=60):
proc = subprocess.Popen(command, shell=True,
stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE)
start = time.time()
while proc.poll() is None:
print proc.stdout.read(1024) # <----- Line of interest
if time.time() - start >= timeout:
proc.kill()
break
else:
time.sleep(1)
Consider the marked line above.
If it is included, go('python silence.py') will hang forever - not for just 60 seconds - because read is a blocking call until either 1024 bytes or end of stream, and neither ever comes.
If it is commented, go('python chatty.py') will be printing out 'Hi' over and over, but how can it be streamed back as it is generated? proc.communicate() blocks until end of stream.
I would be happy with a solution that replaces requirement (1) above with "In the case where a timeout did not occur, I want to get stdout and stderr once the algorithm finishes." Even this has been problematic. My implementation attempt is below.
speech.py
for i in xrange(0, 10000):
print 'Hi'
caller2.py
import subprocess
import time
def go2(command, timeout=60):
proc = subprocess.Popen(command, shell=True,
stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE)
start = time.time()
while True:
if proc.poll() is not None:
print proc.communicate()
break
elif time.time() - start >= timeout:
proc.kill()
break
else:
time.sleep(1)
But even this still has problems. Even though python speech.py runs in just a couple seconds, go2('python speech.py') takes the full 60 seconds. This is because the call to print 'Hi' in speech.py is blocking until proc.communicate() is called when the process is killed. Since proc.stdout.read had the problem demonstrated before with silence.py, I'm really at a loss for how to get this working.
How can I get both the stdout and stderr and the timeout behavior?

The trick is to setup a side-band timer to kill the process. I wrote up a program half way between chatty and silent:
import time
import sys
for i in range(10,0,-1):
print i
time.sleep(1)
And then a program to kill it early:
import subprocess as subp
import threading
import signal
proc = subp.Popen(['python', 'longtime.py'], stdout=subp.PIPE,
stderr=subp.PIPE)
timer = threading.Timer(3, lambda proc: proc.send_signal(signal.SIGINT),
args=(proc,))
timer.start()
out, err = proc.communicate()
timer.cancel()
print proc.returncode
print out
print err
and it output:
$ python killer.py
1
10
9
8
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "longtime.py", line 6, in <module>
time.sleep(1)
KeyboardInterrupt
Your timer could be made fancier, like trying increasingly bad signals til the process completes, but you get the idea.

Process execution check and getting PID in Python

I need to run a bash command in the background but then need to kill(os.kill()) it later. I also want to make Sure the command runs I have this to make sure the command runs.
if subprocess.Popen("tcpdump -i eth0 -XX -w /tmp/tmp.cap &", shell=True).wait() == 0:
I'm not sure on how to change this so i can use Popen.pid to get the pid while still being able to check if execution was successful.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks.

To start a subprocess, wait some time and kill it, and check that its exit status is zero:
import shlex
from subprocess import Popen
from threading import Timer
def kill(process):
try:
process.kill()
except OSError:
pass # ignore
p = Popen(shlex.split("tcpdump -i eth0 -XX -w /tmp/tmp.cat"))
t = Timer(10, kill, [p]) # run kill in 10 seconds
t.start()
returncode = p.wait()
t.cancel()
if returncode != 0:
# ...
Or you could implement the timeout yourself:
import shlex
from subprocess import Popen
from time import sleep, time as timer # use time.monotonic instead
p = Popen(shlex.split("tcpdump -i eth0 -XX -w /tmp/tmp.cat"))
deadline = timer() + 10 # kill in 10 seconds if not complete
while timer() < deadline:
if p.poll() is not None: # process has finished
break
sleep(1) # sleep a second
else: # timeout happened
try:
p.kill()
except OSError:
pass
if p.wait() != 0:
# ...
It assumes sleep uses similar clock as timer.
threading.Timer variant allows your code to continue as soon as the subprocess exits.

Use the Popen.poll() method. You can get the Popen.returncode as well to determine if the processes completed successfully.
import subprocess
tasks = [subprocess.Popen('ping www.stackoverflow.com -n 5 && exit 0', shell=True),
subprocess.Popen('ping www.stackoverflow.com -n 5 && exit 1', shell=True)]
for task in tasks:
while task.poll() is None:
# the task has not finished
pass
print task
print task.pid
print task.returncode

showing progress while spawning and running subprocess

I need to show some progress bar or something while spawning and running subprocess.
How can I do that with python?
import subprocess
cmd = ['python','wait.py']
p = subprocess.Popen(cmd, bufsize=1024,stdin=subprocess.PIPE, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE)
p.stdin.close()
outputmessage = p.stdout.read() #This will print the standard output from the spawned process
message = p.stderr.read()
I could spawn subprocess with this code, but I need to print out something when each second is passing.

Since the subprocess call is blocking, one way to print something out while waiting would be to use multithreading. Here's an example using threading._Timer:
import threading
import subprocess
class RepeatingTimer(threading._Timer):
def run(self):
while True:
self.finished.wait(self.interval)
if self.finished.is_set():
return
else:
self.function(*self.args, **self.kwargs)
def status():
print "I'm alive"
timer = RepeatingTimer(1.0, status)
timer.daemon = True # Allows program to exit if only the thread is alive
timer.start()
proc = subprocess.Popen([ '/bin/sleep', "5" ])
proc.wait()
timer.cancel()
On an unrelated note, calling stdout.read() while using multiple pipes can lead to deadlock. The subprocess.communicate() function should be used instead.

As far as I see it all you need to do is put those reads in a loop with a delay and a print - does it have to be precisely a second or around about a second?

Using module 'subprocess' with timeout

Here's the Python code to run an arbitrary command returning its stdout data, or raise an exception on non-zero exit codes:
proc = subprocess.Popen(
cmd,
stderr=subprocess.STDOUT, # Merge stdout and stderr
stdout=subprocess.PIPE,
shell=True)
communicate is used to wait for the process to exit:
stdoutdata, stderrdata = proc.communicate()
The subprocess module does not support timeout--ability to kill a process running for more than X number of seconds--therefore, communicate may take forever to run.
What is the simplest way to implement timeouts in a Python program meant to run on Windows and Linux?

In Python 3.3+:
from subprocess import STDOUT, check_output
output = check_output(cmd, stderr=STDOUT, timeout=seconds)
output is a byte string that contains command's merged stdout, stderr data.
check_output raises CalledProcessError on non-zero exit status as specified in the question's text unlike proc.communicate() method.
I've removed shell=True because it is often used unnecessarily. You can always add it back if cmd indeed requires it. If you add shell=True i.e., if the child process spawns its own descendants; check_output() can return much later than the timeout indicates, see Subprocess timeout failure.
The timeout feature is available on Python 2.x via the subprocess32 backport of the 3.2+ subprocess module.

I don't know much about the low level details; but, given that in
python 2.6 the API offers the ability to wait for threads and
terminate processes, what about running the process in a separate
thread?
import subprocess, threading
class Command(object):
def __init__(self, cmd):
self.cmd = cmd
self.process = None
def run(self, timeout):
def target():
print 'Thread started'
self.process = subprocess.Popen(self.cmd, shell=True)
self.process.communicate()
print 'Thread finished'
thread = threading.Thread(target=target)
thread.start()
thread.join(timeout)
if thread.is_alive():
print 'Terminating process'
self.process.terminate()
thread.join()
print self.process.returncode
command = Command("echo 'Process started'; sleep 2; echo 'Process finished'")
command.run(timeout=3)
command.run(timeout=1)
The output of this snippet in my machine is:
Thread started
Process started
Process finished
Thread finished
0
Thread started
Process started
Terminating process
Thread finished
-15
where it can be seen that, in the first execution, the process
finished correctly (return code 0), while the in the second one the
process was terminated (return code -15).
I haven't tested in windows; but, aside from updating the example
command, I think it should work since I haven't found in the
documentation anything that says that thread.join or process.terminate
is not supported.

jcollado's answer can be simplified using the threading.Timer class:
import shlex
from subprocess import Popen, PIPE
from threading import Timer
def run(cmd, timeout_sec):
proc = Popen(shlex.split(cmd), stdout=PIPE, stderr=PIPE)
timer = Timer(timeout_sec, proc.kill)
try:
timer.start()
stdout, stderr = proc.communicate()
finally:
timer.cancel()
# Examples: both take 1 second
run("sleep 1", 5) # process ends normally at 1 second
run("sleep 5", 1) # timeout happens at 1 second

If you're on Unix,
import signal
...
class Alarm(Exception):
pass
def alarm_handler(signum, frame):
raise Alarm
signal.signal(signal.SIGALRM, alarm_handler)
signal.alarm(5*60) # 5 minutes
try:
stdoutdata, stderrdata = proc.communicate()
signal.alarm(0) # reset the alarm
except Alarm:
print "Oops, taking too long!"
# whatever else

Here is Alex Martelli's solution as a module with proper process killing. The other approaches do not work because they do not use proc.communicate(). So if you have a process that produces lots of output, it will fill its output buffer and then block until you read something from it.
from os import kill
from signal import alarm, signal, SIGALRM, SIGKILL
from subprocess import PIPE, Popen
def run(args, cwd = None, shell = False, kill_tree = True, timeout = -1, env = None):
'''
Run a command with a timeout after which it will be forcibly
killed.
'''
class Alarm(Exception):
pass
def alarm_handler(signum, frame):
raise Alarm
p = Popen(args, shell = shell, cwd = cwd, stdout = PIPE, stderr = PIPE, env = env)
if timeout != -1:
signal(SIGALRM, alarm_handler)
alarm(timeout)
try:
stdout, stderr = p.communicate()
if timeout != -1:
alarm(0)
except Alarm:
pids = [p.pid]
if kill_tree:
pids.extend(get_process_children(p.pid))
for pid in pids:
# process might have died before getting to this line
# so wrap to avoid OSError: no such process
try:
kill(pid, SIGKILL)
except OSError:
pass
return -9, '', ''
return p.returncode, stdout, stderr
def get_process_children(pid):
p = Popen('ps --no-headers -o pid --ppid %d' % pid, shell = True,
stdout = PIPE, stderr = PIPE)
stdout, stderr = p.communicate()
return [int(p) for p in stdout.split()]
if __name__ == '__main__':
print run('find /', shell = True, timeout = 3)
print run('find', shell = True)

Since Python 3.5, there's a new subprocess.run universal command (that is meant to replace check_call, check_output ...) and which has the timeout= parameter as well.
subprocess.run(args, *, stdin=None, input=None, stdout=None, stderr=None, shell=False, cwd=None, timeout=None, check=False, encoding=None, errors=None)
Run the command described by args. Wait for command to complete, then return a CompletedProcess instance.
It raises a subprocess.TimeoutExpired exception when the timeout expires.

timeout is now supported by call() and communicate() in the subprocess module (as of Python3.3):
import subprocess
subprocess.call("command", timeout=20, shell=True)
This will call the command and raise the exception
subprocess.TimeoutExpired
if the command doesn't finish after 20 seconds.
You can then handle the exception to continue your code, something like:
try:
subprocess.call("command", timeout=20, shell=True)
except subprocess.TimeoutExpired:
# insert code here
Hope this helps.

surprised nobody mentioned using timeout
timeout 5 ping -c 3 somehost
This won't for work for every use case obviously, but if your dealing with a simple script, this is hard to beat.
Also available as gtimeout in coreutils via homebrew for mac users.

I've modified sussudio answer. Now function returns: (returncode, stdout, stderr, timeout) - stdout and stderr is decoded to utf-8 string
def kill_proc(proc, timeout):
timeout["value"] = True
proc.kill()
def run(cmd, timeout_sec):
proc = subprocess.Popen(shlex.split(cmd), stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE)
timeout = {"value": False}
timer = Timer(timeout_sec, kill_proc, [proc, timeout])
timer.start()
stdout, stderr = proc.communicate()
timer.cancel()
return proc.returncode, stdout.decode("utf-8"), stderr.decode("utf-8"), timeout["value"]

Another option is to write to a temporary file to prevent the stdout blocking instead of needing to poll with communicate(). This worked for me where the other answers did not; for example on windows.
outFile = tempfile.SpooledTemporaryFile()
errFile = tempfile.SpooledTemporaryFile()
proc = subprocess.Popen(args, stderr=errFile, stdout=outFile, universal_newlines=False)
wait_remaining_sec = timeout
while proc.poll() is None and wait_remaining_sec > 0:
time.sleep(1)
wait_remaining_sec -= 1
if wait_remaining_sec <= 0:
killProc(proc.pid)
raise ProcessIncompleteError(proc, timeout)
# read temp streams from start
outFile.seek(0);
errFile.seek(0);
out = outFile.read()
err = errFile.read()
outFile.close()
errFile.close()

Prepending the Linux command timeout isn't a bad workaround and it worked for me.
cmd = "timeout 20 "+ cmd
subprocess.Popen(cmd.split(), stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE)
(output, err) = p.communicate()

I added the solution with threading from jcollado to my Python module easyprocess.
Install:
pip install easyprocess
Example:
from easyprocess import Proc
# shell is not supported!
stdout=Proc('ping localhost').call(timeout=1.5).stdout
print stdout

Here is my solution, I was using Thread and Event:
import subprocess
from threading import Thread, Event
def kill_on_timeout(done, timeout, proc):
if not done.wait(timeout):
proc.kill()
def exec_command(command, timeout):
done = Event()
proc = subprocess.Popen(command, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE)
watcher = Thread(target=kill_on_timeout, args=(done, timeout, proc))
watcher.daemon = True
watcher.start()
data, stderr = proc.communicate()
done.set()
return data, stderr, proc.returncode
In action:
In [2]: exec_command(['sleep', '10'], 5)
Out[2]: ('', '', -9)
In [3]: exec_command(['sleep', '10'], 11)
Out[3]: ('', '', 0)

The solution I use is to prefix the shell command with timelimit. If the comand takes too long, timelimit will stop it and Popen will have a returncode set by timelimit. If it is > 128, it means timelimit killed the process.
See also python subprocess with timeout and large output (>64K)

if you are using python 2, give it a try
import subprocess32
try:
output = subprocess32.check_output(command, shell=True, timeout=3)
except subprocess32.TimeoutExpired as e:
print e

I've implemented what I could gather from a few of these. This works in Windows, and since this is a community wiki, I figure I would share my code as well:
class Command(threading.Thread):
def __init__(self, cmd, outFile, errFile, timeout):
threading.Thread.__init__(self)
self.cmd = cmd
self.process = None
self.outFile = outFile
self.errFile = errFile
self.timed_out = False
self.timeout = timeout
def run(self):
self.process = subprocess.Popen(self.cmd, stdout = self.outFile, \
stderr = self.errFile)
while (self.process.poll() is None and self.timeout > 0):
time.sleep(1)
self.timeout -= 1
if not self.timeout > 0:
self.process.terminate()
self.timed_out = True
else:
self.timed_out = False
Then from another class or file:
outFile = tempfile.SpooledTemporaryFile()
errFile = tempfile.SpooledTemporaryFile()
executor = command.Command(c, outFile, errFile, timeout)
executor.daemon = True
executor.start()
executor.join()
if executor.timed_out:
out = 'timed out'
else:
outFile.seek(0)
errFile.seek(0)
out = outFile.read()
err = errFile.read()
outFile.close()
errFile.close()

Once you understand full process running machinery in *unix, you will easily find simplier solution:
Consider this simple example how to make timeoutable communicate() meth using select.select() (available alsmost everythere on *nix nowadays). This also can be written with epoll/poll/kqueue, but select.select() variant could be a good example for you. And major limitations of select.select() (speed and 1024 max fds) are not applicapable for your task.
This works under *nix, does not create threads, does not uses signals, can be lauched from any thread (not only main), and fast enought to read 250mb/s of data from stdout on my machine (i5 2.3ghz).
There is a problem in join'ing stdout/stderr at the end of communicate. If you have huge program output this could lead to big memory usage. But you can call communicate() several times with smaller timeouts.
class Popen(subprocess.Popen):
def communicate(self, input=None, timeout=None):
if timeout is None:
return subprocess.Popen.communicate(self, input)
if self.stdin:
# Flush stdio buffer, this might block if user
# has been writing to .stdin in an uncontrolled
# fashion.
self.stdin.flush()
if not input:
self.stdin.close()
read_set, write_set = [], []
stdout = stderr = None
if self.stdin and input:
write_set.append(self.stdin)
if self.stdout:
read_set.append(self.stdout)
stdout = []
if self.stderr:
read_set.append(self.stderr)
stderr = []
input_offset = 0
deadline = time.time() + timeout
while read_set or write_set:
try:
rlist, wlist, xlist = select.select(read_set, write_set, [], max(0, deadline - time.time()))
except select.error as ex:
if ex.args[0] == errno.EINTR:
continue
raise
if not (rlist or wlist):
# Just break if timeout
# Since we do not close stdout/stderr/stdin, we can call
# communicate() several times reading data by smaller pieces.
break
if self.stdin in wlist:
chunk = input[input_offset:input_offset + subprocess._PIPE_BUF]
try:
bytes_written = os.write(self.stdin.fileno(), chunk)
except OSError as ex:
if ex.errno == errno.EPIPE:
self.stdin.close()
write_set.remove(self.stdin)
else:
raise
else:
input_offset += bytes_written
if input_offset >= len(input):
self.stdin.close()
write_set.remove(self.stdin)
# Read stdout / stderr by 1024 bytes
for fn, tgt in (
(self.stdout, stdout),
(self.stderr, stderr),
):
if fn in rlist:
data = os.read(fn.fileno(), 1024)
if data == '':
fn.close()
read_set.remove(fn)
tgt.append(data)
if stdout is not None:
stdout = ''.join(stdout)
if stderr is not None:
stderr = ''.join(stderr)
return (stdout, stderr)

You can do this using select
import subprocess
from datetime import datetime
from select import select
def call_with_timeout(cmd, timeout):
started = datetime.now()
sp = subprocess.Popen(cmd, stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
while True:
p = select([sp.stdout], [], [], timeout)
if p[0]:
p[0][0].read()
ret = sp.poll()
if ret is not None:
return ret
if (datetime.now()-started).total_seconds() > timeout:
sp.kill()
return None

python 2.7
import time
import subprocess
def run_command(cmd, timeout=0):
start_time = time.time()
df = subprocess.Popen(cmd, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE)
while timeout and df.poll() == None:
if time.time()-start_time >= timeout:
df.kill()
return -1, ""
output = '\n'.join(df.communicate()).strip()
return df.returncode, output

Example of captured output after timeout tested in Python 3.7.8:
try:
return subprocess.run(command, shell=True, capture_output=True, timeout=20, cwd=cwd, universal_newlines=True)
except subprocess.TimeoutExpired as e:
print(e.output.decode(encoding="utf-8", errors="ignore"))
assert False;
The exception subprocess.TimeoutExpired has the output and other members:
cmd - Command that was used to spawn the child process.
timeout - Timeout in seconds.
output - Output of the child process if it was captured by run() or
check_output(). Otherwise, None.
stdout - Alias for output, for symmetry with stderr.
stderr - Stderr output of the child process if it was captured by
run(). Otherwise, None.
More info: https://docs.python.org/3/library/subprocess.html#subprocess.TimeoutExpired

I've used killableprocess successfully on Windows, Linux and Mac. If you are using Cygwin Python, you'll need OSAF's version of killableprocess because otherwise native Windows processes won't get killed.

Although I haven't looked at it extensively, this decorator I found at ActiveState seems to be quite useful for this sort of thing. Along with subprocess.Popen(..., close_fds=True), at least I'm ready for shell-scripting in Python.

This solution kills the process tree in case of shell=True, passes parameters to the process (or not), has a timeout and gets the stdout, stderr and process output of the call back (it uses psutil for the kill_proc_tree). This was based on several solutions posted in SO including jcollado's. Posting in response to comments by Anson and jradice in jcollado's answer. Tested in Windows Srvr 2012 and Ubuntu 14.04. Please note that for Ubuntu you need to change the parent.children(...) call to parent.get_children(...).
def kill_proc_tree(pid, including_parent=True):
parent = psutil.Process(pid)
children = parent.children(recursive=True)
for child in children:
child.kill()
psutil.wait_procs(children, timeout=5)
if including_parent:
parent.kill()
parent.wait(5)
def run_with_timeout(cmd, current_dir, cmd_parms, timeout):
def target():
process = subprocess.Popen(cmd, cwd=current_dir, shell=True, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stdin=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE)
# wait for the process to terminate
if (cmd_parms == ""):
out, err = process.communicate()
else:
out, err = process.communicate(cmd_parms)
errcode = process.returncode
thread = Thread(target=target)
thread.start()
thread.join(timeout)
if thread.is_alive():
me = os.getpid()
kill_proc_tree(me, including_parent=False)
thread.join()

There's an idea to subclass the Popen class and extend it with some simple method decorators. Let's call it ExpirablePopen.
from logging import error
from subprocess import Popen
from threading import Event
from threading import Thread
class ExpirablePopen(Popen):
def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
self.timeout = kwargs.pop('timeout', 0)
self.timer = None
self.done = Event()
Popen.__init__(self, *args, **kwargs)
def __tkill(self):
timeout = self.timeout
if not self.done.wait(timeout):
error('Terminating process {} by timeout of {} secs.'.format(self.pid, timeout))
self.kill()
def expirable(func):
def wrapper(self, *args, **kwargs):
# zero timeout means call of parent method
if self.timeout == 0:
return func(self, *args, **kwargs)
# if timer is None, need to start it
if self.timer is None:
self.timer = thr = Thread(target=self.__tkill)
thr.daemon = True
thr.start()
result = func(self, *args, **kwargs)
self.done.set()
return result
return wrapper
wait = expirable(Popen.wait)
communicate = expirable(Popen.communicate)
if __name__ == '__main__':
from subprocess import PIPE
print ExpirablePopen('ssh -T git#bitbucket.org', stdout=PIPE, timeout=1).communicate()

I had the problem that I wanted to terminate a multithreading subprocess if it took longer than a given timeout length. I wanted to set a timeout in Popen(), but it did not work. Then, I realized that Popen().wait() is equal to call() and so I had the idea to set a timeout within the .wait(timeout=xxx) method, which finally worked. Thus, I solved it this way:
import os
import sys
import signal
import subprocess
from multiprocessing import Pool
cores_for_parallelization = 4
timeout_time = 15 # seconds
def main():
jobs = [...YOUR_JOB_LIST...]
with Pool(cores_for_parallelization) as p:
p.map(run_parallel_jobs, jobs)
def run_parallel_jobs(args):
# Define the arguments including the paths
initial_terminal_command = 'C:\\Python34\\python.exe' # Python executable
function_to_start = 'C:\\temp\\xyz.py' # The multithreading script
final_list = [initial_terminal_command, function_to_start]
final_list.extend(args)
# Start the subprocess and determine the process PID
subp = subprocess.Popen(final_list) # starts the process
pid = subp.pid
# Wait until the return code returns from the function by considering the timeout.
# If not, terminate the process.
try:
returncode = subp.wait(timeout=timeout_time) # should be zero if accomplished
except subprocess.TimeoutExpired:
# Distinguish between Linux and Windows and terminate the process if
# the timeout has been expired
if sys.platform == 'linux2':
os.kill(pid, signal.SIGTERM)
elif sys.platform == 'win32':
subp.terminate()
if __name__ == '__main__':
main()

Late answer for Linux only, but in case someone wants to use subprocess.getstatusoutput(), where the timeout argument isn't available, you can use the built-in Linux timeout on the beginning of the command, i.e.:
import subprocess
timeout = 25 # seconds
cmd = f"timeout --preserve-status --foreground {timeout} ping duckgo.com"
exit_c, out = subprocess.getstatusoutput(cmd)
if (exit_c == 0):
print("success")
else:
print("Error: ", out)
timeout Arguments:
--preserve-status : Preserving the Exit Status
--foreground : Running in Foreground
25 : timeout value in seconds

Unfortunately, I'm bound by very strict policies on the disclosure of source code by my employer, so I can't provide actual code. But for my taste the best solution is to create a subclass overriding Popen.wait() to poll instead of wait indefinitely, and Popen.__init__ to accept a timeout parameter. Once you do that, all the other Popen methods (which call wait) will work as expected, including communicate.

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/python-subprocess2 provides extensions to the subprocess module which allow you to wait up to a certain period of time, otherwise terminate.
So, to wait up to 10 seconds for the process to terminate, otherwise kill:
pipe = subprocess.Popen('...')
timeout = 10
results = pipe.waitOrTerminate(timeout)
This is compatible with both windows and unix. "results" is a dictionary, it contains "returnCode" which is the return of the app (or None if it had to be killed), as well as "actionTaken". which will be "SUBPROCESS2_PROCESS_COMPLETED" if the process completed normally, or a mask of "SUBPROCESS2_PROCESS_TERMINATED" and SUBPROCESS2_PROCESS_KILLED depending on action taken (see documentation for full details)

for python 2.6+, use gevent
from gevent.subprocess import Popen, PIPE, STDOUT
def call_sys(cmd, timeout):
p= Popen(cmd, shell=True, stdout=PIPE)
output, _ = p.communicate(timeout=timeout)
assert p.returncode == 0, p. returncode
return output
call_sys('./t.sh', 2)
# t.sh example
sleep 5
echo done
exit 1

Sometimes you need to process (ffmpeg) without using communicate() and in this case you need asynchronous timeout, a practical way to do this using ttldict
pip install ttldict
from ttldict import TTLOrderedDict
sp_timeout = TTLOrderedDict(default_ttl=10)
def kill_on_timeout(done, proc):
while True:
now = time.time()
if sp_timeout.get('exp_time') == None:
proc.kill()
break
process = subprocess.Popen(cmd, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, text=True, stderr=subprocess.STDOUT)
sp_timeout['exp_time'] = time.time()
done = Event()
watcher = Thread(target=kill_on_timeout, args=(done, process))
watcher.daemon = True
watcher.start()
done.set()
for line in process.stdout:
.......