No output in Google colab terminal commands

Thanks for this utility.

Something I noticed when trying to test something that used it, is that when terminal-like commands that use alive_progress are run in Google Colab cells (by prefixing with !), alive_progress does not provide any output at all, even on completion.

Here is a reproducible example: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1swUZNMAIY_XVGhJbpB9zLxvjH7391CM8?usp=sharing

It just seemed odd, as generally these calls work normally for a whole range of things, including tqdm bars, so I thought I’d raise the Issue. But I guess it’s probably some complex thing about how one or other is implemented, so don’t worry if nothing can be done about it.

Thanks

[rsalmei]

Wow man, you really did your homework! I’ve seen the links, and I see your point, it really is a bug in Python, and perhaps worth considering. I’m glad they’ll fix it in 3.11, but how unfortunate not back-port it!! 😞 Well, I’ll think about including it! 👍

[rsalmei]

Thanks, @theosanderson.

I’m not aware of how this google colab works, but it does seem like an ipython.

I’d say it does work the way you’ve called it, but colab is not correctly capturing the terminal output… Look what I got: It was curious how the lines were being skipped in a timely fashion as I’d expect, just without any output on the browser, but it surely was running in the back.

Anyway, I really don’t know how to help with this. tqdm has a whole different implementation for ipython, using graphical widgets, which can not really be compared. I think it is related to how colab creates new shell processes, and capture their stdout and stderr outputs…

For me, the most important is that direct code like this works in real-time:

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/6652853/165472062-67425e6f-a77b-4b77-a575-85edc530ad96.mov

I’m going to close this one, but feel free to reply if you need anything else! 👍