Python subprocess: callback when cmd exits

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You’re right – there is no nice API for this. You’re also right on your second point – it’s trivially easy to design a function that does this for you using threading.

import threading
import subprocess

def popen_and_call(on_exit, popen_args):
    """
    Runs the given args in a subprocess.Popen, and then calls the function
    on_exit when the subprocess completes.
    on_exit is a callable object, and popen_args is a list/tuple of args that 
    would give to subprocess.Popen.
    """
    def run_in_thread(on_exit, popen_args):
        proc = subprocess.Popen(*popen_args)
        proc.wait()
        on_exit()
        return
    thread = threading.Thread(target=run_in_thread, args=(on_exit, popen_args))
    thread.start()
    # returns immediately after the thread starts
    return thread

Even threading is pretty easy in Python, but note that if on_exit() is computationally expensive, you’ll want to put this in a separate process instead using multiprocessing (so that the GIL doesn’t slow your program down). It’s actually very simple – you can basically just replace all calls to threading.Thread with multiprocessing.Process since they follow (almost) the same API.

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