If there were a blocking "read x bytes" type call, could you not do some non-blocking stuff afterwards? If you use the "read" method, with a byte limit, directly on the stdout member of Popen, that could return with your bytes, and then you do some non-blocking stuff afterwards. That's the external view of course, I suspect that you're saying there's some internal lower-level reason this is currently not possible.

Thanks for your interim class BTW, it is proving to be very useful.