>>> a = subprocess.Popen(['cat', '/path/to/text.ini'], stdout=subprocess.PIPE, universal_newlines=True)
>>> b = configparser.ConfigParser()
>>> b.read_file(a.stdout)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/hostname/sig/local/lib/python3.2/configparser.py", line 708, in read_file
    self._read(f, source)
  File "/hostname/sig/local/lib/python3.2/configparser.py", line 994, in _read
    for lineno, line in enumerate(fp, start=1):
AttributeError: '_io.FileIO' object has no attribute 'read1'

Also this fails without universal_readlines, which is not so bad except that the name 'read_file' doesn't exactly indicate this.

I found one mildly related bug: http://bugs.python.org/issue11670