From: ptkwt@...1.aracnet.com (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2001-04-13T06:41:23+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:13626] getting exitcode using popen


I'm using popen to launch a program so that I can get the stdin of that 
process and send a Control-C to it after a specified amount of time, like:

someTime = 100
command = "someprog -someargs"
begin
  timeout(someTime) do
    cmdstdin = IO.popen("#{command}","w")
    Process.wait
  end
rescue TimeoutError
  cmdstdin.putc "^C"
end 


This works fine on WindowsNT and Win2K but not on Win95|98 (for the 
moment, that's OK, I've got another way to do it on those platforms 
involving calls to Win32API functions.).  What I still need from this is a 
way to determine the exitcode of the program that was run in popen.  Is 
there any way of doing that?

With system you get the exitcode, but not the stdin for the child program, 
with popen you get the stdin, but not the exitcode...

Phil