1. Please see last comments/patches for issue8052
2. Not closing some descriptos is security breach (PEP-0446 describes that)


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Calling getdents()/readdir64() repeatedly while closing descriptors provides unexpected behaviour. Reading directory while it modified is not safe by default. For example: http://en.it-usenet.org/thread/18514/15719/. 

So, we should re-open directory if we received full array of structures. I don't know if just lseek(dirfd, 0) sufficies.

Please reopen bug, as Linux behaviour of stable reading /proc/<pid>/fd may be broken in future without any error at python side (!) (typically, second call returns empty list if dir was modified)

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Also, please check exit code of getdents() instead of just ignoring error and NOT closing file descriptors.
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P.S. Please set affected python versions...

A Python test that reproduces this would be nice to have though I realize it isn't something necessarily useful to run as part of a unittest suite given this one would rely on OS kernel implementation details and chances of race conditions occurring.

Regardless I agree with the general comments.  This code could be improved with better error handling given the poor APIs for getting a list of open file descriptors that we have to work with.

It should be much less of an issue in 3.4 and later due to the O_CLOEXEC default via http://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0446/ but the posixsubprocess code should be updated to handle the errors better there regardless.

Is this still relevant with O_CLOEXEC?

Yes, it is still relevant. For example for closing fds after fork().