The subprocess module may suffer from a minor design flaw that is
described at http://unixwiz.net/techtips/remap-pipe-fds.html under the
heading "Descriptor Debacle". The problem can occur under rare
conditions when a subprocess is created from a Python daemon process.

Proposed solution:

Create a function os.duprange(*args) that takes one or more tuple pairs
of file descriptors. The function takes care of the necessary order and
dubbing of fds.

It seems to me that subprocess is protected against this flaw. Python 2.x has a pure-Python implementation of the child logic (which is susceptible to an unrelated issue). Python 3.x has a C implementation which falls back to pure-Python if the former is not available.

Both implementations test explicitly that they're not closing standard file descriptors after the dup2() call in the child. It is my understanding that test is sufficient, I couldn't reproduce the bug in Python, and thus I think this issue should be closed.

All that said, there was no coverage in subprocess' test for this particular case (spawning a coprocess when the standard fds closed). I'm attaching a patch which adds a testcase to cover it.

Thanks for the test!  I'll take a look and likely commit this later.

Would the test still be correct if it didn't close stderr? I feel closing stderr is very bad from a debuggability standpoint.

I think if the test is conducted without closing stderr, it will only check that stdin/stdout are handled correctly (you could assume that if one handled stdin/stdout correctly, they did the same with stderr).

However, since I've used a context manager (_NoStandardFds) to handle the closing/restoration of the standard fds, I think the benefit (fuller test coverage) outweighs the cost (potentially harder debugging if there's a problem with the test); if I'm not mistaken, the context manager should restore your fds before the default exception handler writes to stdout (at least in the parent and the child prior to exec()).

n.b.: I've also created a Rietveld issue for this patch: http://codereview.appspot.com/1227041/show

The patch is small, is there any solid reason for not committing it?

Superseded by #10806.