Why do I get a segmentation fault while redirecting sys.stdout to Tkinter.Text widget in Python?

Question

I'm in the process of building a GUI-based application with Python/Tkinter that builds on top of the existing Python bdb module. In this application, I want to silence all stdout/stderr from the console and redirect it to my GUI. To accomplish this purpose, I've written a specialized Tkinter.Text object (code at the end of the post).

The basic idea is that when something is written to sys.stdout, it shows up as a line in the "Text" with the color black. If something is written to sys.stderr, it shows up as a line in the "Text" with the color red. As soon as something is written, the Text always scrolls down to view the most recent line.

I'm using Python 2.6.1 at the moment. On Mac OS X 10.5, this seems to work great. I have had zero problems with it. On RedHat Enterprise Linux 5, however, I pretty reliably get a segmentation fault during the run of a script. The segmentation fault doesn't always occur in the same place, but it pretty much always occurs. If I comment out the sys.stdout= and sys.stderr= lines from my code, the segmentation faults seem to go away.

I'm sure there are other ways around this that I will probably have to resort to, but can anyone see anything I'm doing blatantly wrong here that could be causing these segmentation faults? It's driving me nuts. Thanks!

PS - I realize redirecting sys.stderr to the GUI might not be a great idea, but I still get segmentation faults even when I only redirect sys.stdout and not sys.stderr. I also realize that I'm allowing the Text to grow indefinitely at the moment.

class ConsoleText(tk.Text):
    '''A Tkinter Text widget that provides a scrolling display of console
    stderr and stdout.'''

    class IORedirector(object):
        '''A general class for redirecting I/O to this Text widget.'''
        def __init__(self,text_area):
            self.text_area = text_area

    class StdoutRedirector(IORedirector):
        '''A class for redirecting stdout to this Text widget.'''
        def write(self,str):
            self.text_area.write(str,False)

    class StderrRedirector(IORedirector):
        '''A class for redirecting stderr to this Text widget.'''
        def write(self,str):
            self.text_area.write(str,True)

    def __init__(self, master=None, cnf={}, **kw):
        '''See the __init__ for Tkinter.Text for most of this stuff.'''

        tk.Text.__init__(self, master, cnf, **kw)

        self.started = False
        self.write_lock = threading.Lock()

        self.tag_configure('STDOUT',background='white',foreground='black')
        self.tag_configure('STDERR',background='white',foreground='red')

        self.config(state=tk.DISABLED)

    def start(self):

        if self.started:
            return

        self.started = True

        self.original_stdout = sys.stdout
        self.original_stderr = sys.stderr

        stdout_redirector = ConsoleText.StdoutRedirector(self)
        stderr_redirector = ConsoleText.StderrRedirector(self)

        sys.stdout = stdout_redirector
        sys.stderr = stderr_redirector

    def stop(self):

        if not self.started:
            return

        self.started = False

        sys.stdout = self.original_stdout
        sys.stderr = self.original_stderr

    def write(self,val,is_stderr=False):

        #Fun Fact:  The way Tkinter Text objects work is that if they're disabled,
        #you can't write into them AT ALL (via the GUI or programatically).  Since we want them
        #disabled for the user, we have to set them to NORMAL (a.k.a. ENABLED), write to them,
        #then set their state back to DISABLED.

        self.write_lock.acquire()
        self.config(state=tk.NORMAL)

        self.insert('end',val,'STDERR' if is_stderr else 'STDOUT')
        self.see('end')

        self.config(state=tk.DISABLED)
        self.write_lock.release()

Answer 1

I'm assuming this is part of a larger, threaded program.

Instead of using a lock, have your code write to a thread-safe queue object. Then, in your main thread you poll the queue and write to the text widget. You can do the polling using the event loop (versus writing your own loop) by running the polling job which reschedules itself to run a few ms later using after (a couple hundred ms is probably quite sufficient).

Answer 2

Alright, so I've managed to track down the problem. I was never able to recreate this problem on Mac OS X 10.5.8 where I originally developed the code. The segmentation faults only seem to occur on RedHat Enterprise Linux 5.

It turns out that this piece of code is the culprit:

def write(self,val,is_stderr=False):

        #Fun Fact:  The way Tkinter Text objects work is that if they're disabled,
        #you can't write into them AT ALL (via the GUI or programatically).  Since we want them
        #disabled for the user, we have to set them to NORMAL (a.k.a. ENABLED), write to them,
        #then set their state back to DISABLED.

        self.write_lock.acquire()
        self.config(state=tk.NORMAL)

        self.insert('end',val,'STDERR' if is_stderr else 'STDOUT')
        self.see('end')

        self.config(state=tk.DISABLED)
        self.write_lock.release()

I wish I had an explanation for why the segmentation faults are occurring, but I've found that constantly enabling and disabling the Text object is the culprit. If I change the above piece of code to this:

def write(self,val,is_stderr=False):

        self.write_lock.acquire()

        self.insert('end',val,'STDERR' if is_stderr else 'STDOUT')
        self.see('end')

        self.write_lock.release()

My segmentation faults go away when I remove the self.config(state=...) calls. The whole point of the self.config(state=...) calls was to make it so the user could not edit the Text field. When the Text field is in tk.DISABLED state though, calls to self.insert(...) do not work either.

The workaround solution I've come up with is to leave the Text field enabled, but cause the Text field to ignore all keyboard input (thus giving the illusion of read-only behavior if the user attempts to use the keyboard). The easiest way to do this is to change the __init__ method to look like this (change the state to tk.NORMAL and change the binding for <Key> events):

def __init__(self, master=None, cnf={}, **kw):
        '''See the __init__ for Tkinter.Text for most of this stuff.'''

        tk.Text.__init__(self, master, cnf, **kw)

        self.started = False
        self.write_lock = threading.Lock()

        self.tag_configure('STDOUT',background='white',foreground='black')
        self.tag_configure('STDERR',background='white',foreground='red')

        self.config(state=tk.NORMAL)
        self.bind('<Key>',lambda e: 'break') #ignore all key presses

Hope that helps anyone who runs into the same problem.