Getting realtime output using subprocess

By setting the buffer size to 1, you essentially force the process to not buffer the output.

p = subprocess.Popen(cmd, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, bufsize=1)
for line in iter(p.stdout.readline, b''):
    print line,
p.stdout.close()
p.wait()

I tried this, and for some reason while the code

for line in p.stdout:
  ...

buffers aggressively, the variant

while True:
  line = p.stdout.readline()
  if not line: break
  ...

does not. Apparently this is a known bug: http://bugs.python.org/issue3907 (The issue is now "Closed" as of Aug 29, 2018)