Writing to sys.stdout on OS X can fail with IOError: [Errno 4] Interrupted system call. I have observed this while trying to write to sys.stdout when SIGCHLD is received. The script below consistently reproduces the problem with python 2.7.2 on OS X 10.9.3. import sys import os import signal import subprocess import time children = {} def claim_child(): pid, status = os.wait() p = children.pop(pid) def trap(sig, frame): claim_child() signal.signal(signal.SIGCHLD, trap) running = 0 max_procs = 70 program = [sys.executable, '-c', 'import sys, time; print sys.version; time.sleep(3)'] f = sys.stdout # crashes with: IOError: [Errno 4] Interrupted system call # f = file('/tmp/eintr.log', 'w') # works just fine while True: while len(children) < max_procs: f.write('starting program: {}\n'.format(program)) p = subprocess.Popen(program) children[p.pid] = p time.sleep(0.05)

There have been a number of EINTR-releated issues reported in the past, some unique to BSD-based systems and/or OS X; see for example, Issue9867 and Issue12268. I don't know that any of them specifically addressed problems with writes to Python 2 file objects. FWIW, with your test case, I'm not able to reproduce a failure on 10.9.3 using python.org 2.7.8 or 2.7.3 or with the system 2.7.5. And, with a modified print(), I didn't see a failure with python.org 3.4.1, either. Can you say more about the origins of your Python 2.7.2? Have you tried with a current 2.7.8? How quickly does the test fail, e.g. after how many iterations?

This issue is just an example of issue addressed by the issue #18885.

Yes, an issue not likely to be addressed in Python 2.7. I'm still curious as to why I'm not able to reproduce the problem, though. I suppose it could just come down to differences in the system it is running on, like workload, amount of memory, and/or number of processors.

Sorry, I had a typo in the original report - I am actually using Python 2.7.7 installed with homebrew. The script crashes for me on the first iteration every time using iTerm as my terminal. I just tried it in Terminal, and it doesn't crash. Maybe it's actually an issue with iTerm?

I can reproduce the issue on Linux: Traceback (most recent call last): File "x.py", line 26, in <module> f.write('starting program: {}\n'.format(program)) IOError: [Errno 4] Interrupted system call

> I can reproduce the issue on Linux: Sorry, I forgot to mention that I reproduced the issue on Fedora 20 with Python 2.7. I cannot reproduce with Python 3.3.

I also can reproduce this on Linux with Python 2.7 but not with 3.4 which uses a different io system. So the question is: is anyone interested in addressing this for Python 2 file objects?

I'm interested to work on all EINTR issues, including Python 2. I'm working on a new PEP with Charles-François Natali to address *all* EINTR at once in Python 3.5. If the PEP is accepted, we may fix some EINTR issues on Python 2. Some changes change the behaviour and so cannot we done in Python 2. Well, the PEP is still a draft, we will see that later.

@hypo Is there any reason you keep this PEP "secret" :) by not mentioning it on bug 18885?