Best way to fork multiple shell commands/processes in Python?

Question

Most of the examples I've seen with os.fork and the subprocess/multiprocessing modules show how to fork a new instance of the calling python script or a chunk of python code. What would be the best way to spawn a set of arbitrary shell command concurrently?

I suppose, I could just use subprocess.call or one of the Popen commands and pipe the output to a file, which I believe will return immediately, at least to the caller. I know this is not that hard to do, I'm just trying to figure out the simplest, most Pythonic way to do it.

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

All calls to subprocess.Popen return immediately to the caller. It's the calls to wait and communicate which block. So all you need to do is spin up a number of processes using subprocess.Popen (set stdin to /dev/null for safety), and then one by one call communicate until they're all complete.

Naturally I'm assuming you're just trying to start a bunch of unrelated (i.e. not piped together) commands.