OK Danny! I found it! When I was almost asleep last night, I knew what to do and this morning I whittled it down to this situation. Maybe it can be whittled further but I'm holding up our project and I can't take any more time right now.

Note that the two variables TO_WHOM and MAILER, I think, can be safely changed to suit your environment, indeed MAILER='mail' should work for others.

It happens on 2.4 but not on 2.3. Either 2.3 masks my error, or 2.4 has an error?

I wouldn't be surprised if this is responsible for my thread problem but we're not going to find out.

---- #!/usr/bin/env python2.4 '''On my python2.4, this produces: ./test_exim.py close failed: [Errno 9] Bad file descriptor close failed: [Errno 9] Bad file descriptor close failed: [Errno 9] Bad file descriptor

but it runs just fine.

but if I specify python2.3, it runs cleanly.

'''

TO_WHOM = 'marilyn' MAILER = 'exim'

import popen2 import select import os

class Exim: def __init__(self): self.fdin = None self.err_flush = [] self.stdout, self.stdin, self.stderr = popen2.popen3('%s -t' % MAILER) self.fdin = self.stdin.fileno() self.fdout = self.stdout.fileno() self.fderr = self.stderr.fileno() self.outlist = [self.fdout, self.fderr] self.inlist = [self.fdin]

def __del__(self): self.close_up()

def close_up(self): if not self.fdin: return count = 0 in_status = os.close(self.fdin) while 1: sel = select.select(self.outlist, [], [], 1) if sel[0] == []: break else: for fd in sel[0]: r = os.read(fd, 16384) if r: self.err_flush += [r] count = 0 count += 1 if count >= 5: break else: continue break self.err_flush = ''.join(self.err_flush) out_status = os.close(self.fdout) err_status = os.close(self.fderr) self.fdin = None if not in_status: return raise RuntimeError, self.err_flush

def write(self, stuff): while 1: sel = select.select(self.outlist, self.inlist, [], 1) if sel[1] != []: os.write(sel[1][0], stuff) return

################################################################ if __name__ == '__main__': msg = '''To: %s

xx''' % TO_WHOM

p = Exim() p.write(msg) del p

----

On Tue, 18 Jan 2005, Danny Yoo wrote:

Yes. poplib and socket. But, it's not fair to assume that something funky is happening in there. A poplib should provide a set of tools for making a pop client and I'm not making a pop client, just pumping the message from a pop server through my python/mysql magic and into exim. Similarly with socket. It does buffering and prepares things that I don't need, but probably lots of people do. So when I say I don't "trust" stdlib modules, I mean I don't trust them to be simple enough for my situation.

However, all that said, I do dimly remember that poplib perhaps had some extra processing that maybe is not needed -- but I could be wrong.

Yes, the function[..] is responsible to write_and_close at the proper time in its processing, which varies from function to function. At this point we are very intimate with exim. Right now a failure to write_and_close causes mail to be deferred, which is good, but it does it ungracefully. So maybe I will fiddle there to make it better.

Thank you. Things have improved.

Are you well yet? A lot of sick people around these days!

M.