On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 10:59 PM, Skip Montanaro <skip.montan...@gmail.com> wrote: > Due to presumed bugs in an underlying library over which I have no control, > I'm considering a restart in the wee hours of the morning. The basic > fork/exec dance is not a problem, but how do I discover all the open file > descriptors in the new child process to make sure they get closed? Do I > simply start at fd 3 and call os.close() on everything up to some largish fd > number? Some of these file descriptors will have been opened by stuff well > below the Python level, so I don't know them a priori.
What Python version are you targeting? Are you aware of PEP 446? https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0446/ tl;dr: As of Python 3.4, the default is to close file descriptors on exec automatically - and atomically, where possible. I'm not sure if there's a 2.7 backport available, though even if there is, you'll need to manually set your files non-inheritable; AIUI the default in 2.7 can't be changed for backward compatibility reasons (the change in 3.4 *will* break code that was relying on automatic inheritability of FDs - they now have to be explicitly tagged). ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list