Textview updated with ouput from shell command

Hi,
a quite frequent situation when writing pygtk apps is that of having to
show the output generated by a shell command inside a textview.

As that is a recurrent question I've been trying to write a simple example
so it could be put in the FAQ. The problem seems to be avoiding blocking
in the external process, so the example in FAQ 23.20, with a coroutine
approach calling gtk.main_iteration() doesn't work.

Most people seem to be using threads to do the job, but apparently it is
also possible to use pipes in *nix systems in non-blocking mode.

So far I could only get working a threaded example and my question is...
can you think of a portable solution (*nix, Win32 at least...) that can be
used as easily as the threaded one but without using threads?.

Could be fine using a threaded solution here?.

Are you fine with an example like this going into the FAQ? Any comments to
improve the example so it can go to the FAQ?

--- Example

#!/usr/bin/env python

import os, threading, locale

import pygtk
pygtk.require('2.0')
import gtk
import gobject

encoding = locale.getlocale()[1]
utf8conv = lambda x : unicode(x, encoding).encode('utf8')

sw = gtk.ScrolledWindow()
sw.set_policy(gtk.POLICY_AUTOMATIC, gtk.POLICY_AUTOMATIC)
textview = gtk.TextView()
textbuffer = textview.get_buffer()
sw.add(textview)

def on_button_clicked(button, buffer):
    command = 'dir -R %s' % os.getcwd()
    thr = threading.Thread(target= read_output, args=(command, buffer))
    thr.run()

def read_output(oscommand, txtbuffer):
    stdin, stdouterr = os.popen4(oscommand)
    for line in stdouterr.readlines():
        txtbuffer.insert(txtbuffer.get_end_iter(), utf8conv(line))

win = gtk.Window()
win.resize(300,500)
win.connect('delete-event', gtk.main_quit)
button = gtk.Button(u"Press me!")
button.connect("clicked", on_button_clicked, textbuffer)
vbox = gtk.VBox()
vbox.pack_start(button, gtk.FALSE)
vbox.pack_start(sw)
win.add(vbox)
win.show_all()

gtk.main()

--

Take care,

Pachi

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