Leakless

Leakless is a Python 3 library for manipulating low-level UNIX calls, in such a way that you're less likely to leak external resources.

AutoFD

The AutoFD class wraps an integer file descriptor and will automatically close() it when garbage collected.

You could imagine doing the same thing with __del__() methods, or judicious use of try: ... finally: ... and context managers, but this goes further that what's possible from pure Python.

Subreaper

Provides something like os.spawnve, except that it wraps the child process such that grandchild processes are killed when the primary child process exits.

This feature is Linux-only. It's based on PR_SET_CHILD_SUBREAPER.

Processes killed by the subreaper wrapper are given a few seconds to respond to a SIGTERM before being SIGKILLed.

Notes

Leakless makes no attempt at thread-safety. Its classes are not threadsafe, and some of its guarantees (namely, always setting CLOEXEC) can race with a fork() call happening in another thread. That said, it's probably fine for most threaded python use-cases.

This library is currently highly untested, and I'm not even using it for real yet, so... don't trust it.

On Linux, at least kernel version 3.5 is required for everything to work correctly; I'm not testing so it could be higher though.