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()