To get around the problem of child subprocesses spewing out too much output and blocking the parent process, one can provide an open file handle to the stdout/stderr arguments of the Popen call. I've ran into this many times and this solution has reliably worked for me every time. This could be documented better in the Python docs.
For quick tasks and scripts, I've found subprocess.check_call, and subprocess.check_output with shell=True are great tools for spawning subprocesses and quickly grabbing output. They're pretty straightforward to use.
For quick tasks and scripts, I've found subprocess.check_call, and subprocess.check_output with shell=True are great tools for spawning subprocesses and quickly grabbing output. They're pretty straightforward to use.