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subprocess (spawned by os.system) inherits open TCP/UDP/IP port

Steve Holden steve at holdenweb.com
Fri Jul 20 14:38:34 EDT 2007 
Hrvoje Niksic wrote:
> alf <ask at me> writes:
> 
>> still would like to find out why it is happening (now FD_CLOEXEC
>> narrowed may yahooing/googling searches). While realize that file
>> descriptors are shared by forked processes it is still weird why the
>> port moves to the child process once parent gets killed. what it the
>> parent got multiple subprocesses.
> 
> Netstat probably shows only one of the processes that hold to the
> port, possibly the one with the lowest PID (the parent).
> 
>> Plus it is kind of unintuitive os.system does not protect from such
>> behavoir which is for me more an equivalent of like issuing a ne
>> wcommand/ starting a process from the shell.
> 
> It is considered a feature that fork/exec'ed programs inherit file
> descriptors -- that's how stdin and stdout get inherited all the time.
> It doesn't occur often with network connections because shells rarely
> have reason to open them.

It would be hard to figure out how (x)inetd or TCP wrappers could work 
without the open connection being passed to the spawned server process.

regards
  Steve
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