Communication between two gnome-terminal sessions

Question

I have python program main.py

import subprocess

p = subprocess.Popen(
  "/usr/bin/gnome-terminal -x 'handler.py'", 
  shell = True, stdin = subprocess.PIPE, stdout = subprocess.PIPE)
p.stdin.write('Text sent to handler for display\n')

where handler.py is

#!/usr/bin/python
print "In handler..."

Program main.py opens a new gnome-terminal and runs handler.py to display "In handler...". How can I get handler.py to receive and print "Text sent to the handler for display" sent from main.py?

The answer provided to question "Sending strings between python scripts" is the idea of what I'm after, where handler.py runs in the terminal session created by main.py.

Answer 1

You could change your handler to read from a file given at the command line instead of stdin:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import shutil
import sys
import time

print "In handler..."
with open(sys.argv[1], 'rb') as file:
    shutil.copyfileobj(file, sys.stdout)
sys.stdout.flush()
time.sleep(5)

Then you could create a named pipe in main.py, to send the data:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import os
from subprocess import Popen

fifo = "fifo"
os.mkfifo(fifo)
p = Popen(["gnome-terminal", "-x", "python", "handler.py", fifo])
with open(fifo, 'wb') as file:
    file.write("Text sent to handler for display")
os.remove(fifo)
p.wait()