🔒 Program Not responding [subprocess power shell]

[visual seal]

Hey guys, I'm having a tiny, mostly cosmetic problem here, would appreciate any help!

First up: I am trying to run a gpupdate on a remote computer with powershell through subprocess.

What happens is when my program gets to the point where it executes the gpupdate function, it goes not responding for a minute or two before returning the expected output.

I assume this is because gpupdate usually takes a bit to run, but is there a way to just tell python to chill until the gpupdate is finished? Or maybe a more efficient way to run the command?

Code block on question:

gpupdate_output = subprocess.run(["powershell", "-Command", rf'cd "C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\PSTools"; .\Psexec -accepteula \\{pcname} -s -h powershell -command gpupdate /force'],                                     
 shell=True, text=True, capture_output=True)    
 if "Computer Policy update has completed successfully" in gpupdate_output.stdout: 
        gpupdate_status = True     
else:     
    gpupdate_status = False     return gpupdate_status```

[wild tapir]

@visual seal

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[marsh pilot]

I'm not sure if Windows supports this, but on Linux when you append & to the command, it executes it in the background.

Alternatively you could also run the subprocess.run in a separate thread, so that your Python program's main thread can still respond to user input

[visual seal]

Would that allow for user input while function is running? I basically want the user to just hang out while it runs, instead of closing the program if it hits not responding

[marsh pilot]

Yeah, so long as the user input is handled in a different thread than the subprocess.run. Sure.

[visual seal]

Well time to try and figure out threading lol. Thanks for the help

[marsh pilot]

Python makes this rather simple. Here for a short example:

!e

import threading
import time

def foo(*args):
    print(f"foo({args})")
    time.sleep(3)
    print("Hello")


thread: threading.Thread = threading.Thread(target=foo, args=(1, 2, 3, 4))
thread.start()
print("Main thread")
time.sleep(1)
print("Main thread 2")

[wild tapir]

:white_check_mark: Your 3.13 eval job has completed with return code 0.

001 | foo((1, 2, 3, 4))Main thread
002 | 
003 | Main thread 2
004 | Hello

[marsh pilot]

As you can see however, the multithreading can cause problems with the print. In this case, the print in foo managed to print it's f-string, then the print in the main thread managed to send it's string, then both (idk in which order), send their end string, which is - by default - the '\n'.

If we re-run the same code, we might see a different output

[visual seal]

Okay, I'll save that and try to wrap my head around it lol

[wild tapir]

Python help channel closed for inactivity

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