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| author | Joshua Herman <30265+zitterbewegung@users.noreply.github.com> | 2023-04-24 16:46:12 (GMT) |
|---|---|---|
| committer | GitHub <noreply@github.com> | 2023-04-24 16:46:12 (GMT) |
| commit | 68f583658247ceced323d79e1cf775c91c53c019 (patch) | |
| tree | 881b648e89e1700397a7bcca3e27885a3d9b56cf | |
| parent | 385d8d2b6438c7825006df6106dab41a95332a6a (diff) | |
| download | cpython-68f583658247ceced323d79e1cf775c91c53c019.zip cpython-68f583658247ceced323d79e1cf775c91c53c019.tar.gz cpython-68f583658247ceced323d79e1cf775c91c53c019.tar.bz2 | |
gh-87452: Improve the Popen.returncode docs
Clarifies that it remains None until a method checking the child process status has been called and noticed it has terminated.
| -rw-r--r-- | Doc/library/subprocess.rst | 9 |
1 files changed, 6 insertions, 3 deletions
diff --git a/Doc/library/subprocess.rst b/Doc/library/subprocess.rst index 2b5a82e..53dfbf8 100644 --- a/Doc/library/subprocess.rst +++ b/Doc/library/subprocess.rst @@ -919,9 +919,12 @@ Reassigning them to new values is unsupported: .. attribute:: Popen.returncode - The child return code, set by :meth:`poll` and :meth:`wait` (and indirectly - by :meth:`communicate`). A ``None`` value indicates that the process - hasn't terminated yet. + The child return code. Initially ``None``, :attr:`returncode` is set by + a call to the :meth:`poll`, :meth:`wait`, or :meth:`communicate` methods + if they detect that the process has terminated. + + A ``None`` value indicates that the process hadn't yet terminated at the + time of the last method call. A negative value ``-N`` indicates that the child was terminated by signal ``N`` (POSIX only). |