Reading stdout and stderr of createProcess

2024-03-13: the github repository for this no longer exists and the code sample below is missing some lines. 😞

For some time I’ve used this little utility to run a command with parameters and return stdout if the command exited successfully, or stdout and stderr if there was an error:

readRestOfHandle :: Handle -> IO String
readRestOfHandle h = do
    ineof  [String] -> IO (Either String String)
runShellCommand cmd args = do
    (Just _, Just hout, Just herr, h) <- createProcess (proc cmd args){ std_in = CreatePipe, std_out = CreatePipe, std_err = CreatePipe }

    stdOut <- readRestOfHandle hout
    stdErr <- readRestOfHandle herr

    exitCode  return $ Right stdOut
                     _           -> return $ Left $ stdOut ++ "nnn" ++ stdErr

Unfortunately this code is prone to deadlocking – I had this happen on a call to dcm2mnc. It ran dcm2mnc and then hung.

The fix was to use process-streaming which provides a wrapper for createProcess:

simpleSafeExecute :: PipingPolicy String a -> CreateProcess -> IO (Either String a)

And it’s straightforward to use it to get the stdout and stderr separately:

x <- simpleSafeExecute (pipeoe $ separated (surely B.toLazyM) (surely B.toLazyM)) (proc cmd args)

Here’s my commit where I switched to process-streaming: https://github.com/carlohamalainen/mytardis-rest/commit/7a97d2482abc7e5726ed003a480fc9a27ead7403.

A discussion on haskell-cafe where I found out about process-streaming: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/haskell-cafe/I1ROxgw7DIs/taKHeJJHiVkJ.