I wrote this on Arch Linux, so I doubt your Ubuntu failure is valid. The error you see is what I would expect if the bug were not actually fixed. I suspect you need to recompile /Python/bltinmodule.c, which contains the bug fix. However, the test also hangs OS X buildbots. I can only guess at why it is hanging, either at the waitpid() line or the os.read() line. I am looking at refactoring my test to use the existing check_input_tty() infrastructure. It seems over the top by adding a separate pipe back to the parent process, but presumably will workaround whatever is causing the hang.