How to handle I/O of a subprocess asynchronously? [duplicate] - asynchronous

Question

This question already has answers here:
How to read subprocess output asynchronously
(2 answers)
How do I read the output of a child process without blocking in Rust?
(4 answers)
Closed 3 years ago.
I have a subprocess, which may or may not write something to it's stdout in a specific amount of time, e.g. 3 seconds.
If a new line in the subprocess stdout starts with the correct thing, I want to return the line.
Optimally I would like to realize something like this:
use std::io::{BufRead, BufReader};
use std::thread;
use std::time::Duration;
pub fn wait_for_or_exit(
reader: &BufReader<&mut std::process::ChildStdout>,
wait_time: u64,
cmd: &str,
) -> Option<String> {
let signal: Arc<AtomicBool> = Arc::new(AtomicBool::new(false));
let signal_clone = signal.clone();
let child = thread::spawn(move || {
thread::sleep(Duration::from_millis(wait_time));
signal_clone.store(true, Ordering::Relaxed);
});
let mut line = String::new();
while !signal.load(Ordering::Relaxed) {
//Sleep a really small amount of time not to block cpu
thread::sleep(Duration::from_millis(10));
//This line is obviously invalid!
if reader.has_input() {
line.clear();
reader.read_line(&mut line).unwrap();
if line.starts_with(cmd) {
return Some(line);
}
}
}
None
}
The only line not working here is reader.has_input().
Obviously, if the subprocess answers much faster than the wait_time for a repeated amount of times, there will be a lot of sleeping threads, but I can take care of that with channels.

Answer 1

There are two approaches.
You can spin up a separate thread, and then use some mechanism (probably a channel) to signal success or failure to your waiting thread.
You can use async IO as you mentioned, such as the futures and tokio lib.
I'll demo both. I prefer the futures/Tokio approach, but if you're not familiar with the futures model, then option one might be better.
The Rust stdlib has a Channels API, and this channel actually features a recv_timeout which can help us out quite a bit.
use std::thread;
use std::time::Duration;
use std::sync::mpsc;
// this spins up a separate thread in which to wait for stuff to read
// from the BufReader<ChildStdout>
// If we successfully read, we send the string over the Channel.
// Back in the original thread, we wait for an answer over the channel
// or timeout in wait_time secs.
pub fn wait_for_or_exit(
reader: &BufReader<&mut std::process::ChildStdout>,
wait_time: u64,
cmd: &str,
) -> Option<String> {
let (sender, receiver) = mpsc::channel();
thread::spawn(move || {
let line = reader.read_line();
sender.send(line);
});
match receiver.recv_timeout(Duration::from_secs(wait_time)) {
Ok(line) => if line.starts_with(cmd)
{ Some(line) } else
{ None },
Err(mpsc::RecvTimeoutError::Timeout) => None,
Err(mpsc::RecvTimeoutError::Disconnected) => None
}
}
Option two assumes that you're building a future's based app. In order to accomplish what you want using Async IO is a file descriptor that will let us set NON_BLOCKING. Luckily we don't have to do that ourselves. The Futures and Tokio APIs handle this nicely. The trade-off, is that you have to compose your code out of non-blocking futures.
The code below was taken almost entirely from Tokio Process with a Futures timeout that comes from the Tokio API.
extern crate futures;
extern crate tokio;
extern crate tokio_process;
use std::process::Command;
use std::time::{Duration};
use futures::Future;
use tokio_process::CommandExt;
use tokio::prelude::*;
const TIMEOUT_SECS: u64 = 3;
fn main() {
// Like above, but use `output_async` which returns a future instead of
// immediately returning the `Child`.
let output = Command::new("echo").arg("hello").arg("world")
.output_async();
let future = output.map_err(|e| panic!("failed to collect output: {}", e))
.map(|output| {
assert!(output.status.success());
assert_eq!(output.stdout, b"hello world\n");
println!("received output: {}", String::from_utf8(output.stdout).unwrap());
})
.timeout(Duration::from_secs(TIMEOUT_SECS)) // here is where we say we only want to wait TIMETOUT seconds
.map_err(|_e| { println!("Timed out waiting for data"); });
tokio::run(future);
}