Python popen deadlocks

I have a python script that calls out to an external program using os.popen3(). That function returns file handle like objects for stdin, stdout, and stderr. I need to examine both stdout and stderr separately.

After running this script for a while I started to see it hang at times. This was especially true after I added in a parameter which increased the amount stderr. It turns out that there is a well known deadlock issue with the popen family of commands. Or, rather, it was not known to me until yesterday.

I started to tinker in my script using select.select() as a solution. That seemed a little foreign to my way of thinking so I changed directions and used separate threads for reading from the stderr and stdout file handles that os.popen2() returns. That seemed to do the trick so I'm pretty happy about that.