How do I get the result of OS.execute without blocking the main thread?

Question

I want to get, specifically, the output of OS.execute("ping", ["1.1.1.1", "-n", "1"], true, output) without blocking the main thread.

The solution, I believe, would be something to do with threading, but I am not very familiar with threads and I do not know the proper way to implement a "callback" where the result of the above command would be sent to the main thread to then be processed and the side thread killed.

Answer 1

For those curious, this code snippet is what helped me solve this, from "youwin"

The thread.wait_to_finish() returns the return value of the thread.

extends Node2D

var thread: Thread

func _ready() -> void:
    thread = Thread.new()
    thread.start(self, "_thread")

    while thread.is_alive():
        yield(get_tree(), "idle_frame")

    print(thread.wait_to_finish())
    thread = null

func _thread() -> String:
    var output := []
    var err: int = OS.execute("CMD.exe", ["/C", "dir"], true, output)

    if err != 0:
        printerr("Error occurred: %d" % err)

    return PoolStringArray(output).join("\n")

Answer 2

Quite simple actually ~ the third argument just needs to be false
OS.execute("ping", ["1.1.1.1", "-n", "1"], false, output)

Here's the docs :)

Comments

This results in output not being set

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Per the docs, the output param will be empty if blocking is false (which makes sense).

Have you tried piping the output of ping into a file and monitoring that file from another script?

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Would have issues from the file being locked/actively written from the other thread

If you read the file while it's being written to the data could be corrupted

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I found this gdnative plugin, seems to solve your problem but I haven't tested it. https://github.com/odedstr/Godot-std_io