[Python-Dev] fork or exec? (original) (raw)

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Thu Jan 10 13:52:41 CET 2013

Le Thu, 10 Jan 2013 12:59:02 +0100, Victor Stinner <victor.stinner at gmail.com> a écrit :

2013/1/10 Charles-François Natali <neologix at free.fr>: > Disclaimer: I'm not saying we should be changing all FDs to > close-on-exec by default like Ruby did, I'm just saying that > there's a real problem.

I changed my mind, the PEP does not propose to change the default behaviour (don't set close-on-exec by default). But the PEP proposes to add a function to change the default behaviour. Application developers taking care of security can set close-on-exec by default, but they will have maybe to fix bugs (add cloexec=False argument, call os.setcloexec(fd, True)) because something may expect an inheried file descriptor.

Do you have an example of what that "something" may be? Apart from standard streams, I can't think of any inherited file descriptor an external program would want to rely on.

In other words, I think close-on-exec by default is probably a reasonable decision.

Regards

Antoine.

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