From: Eli Green Date: 2001-10-31T10:24:02+09:00 Subject: [ruby-talk:23892] Re: popen, fork on Win32 popen is not a showstopper. it is relatively easily emulated. fork is a problem. I'm personally not a very big fan of fork()ing, so it doesn't bother me too much that it's not there. Both Perl and Cygwin have emulated a fork() function call under Windows. Perl does it by spawning a separate thread of execution within the same interpreter and just pretending that it forked successfully. Cygwin does a "real" fork by launching a new process and copy the old process data into the new one manually. Or something like that. My memory of the white paper is fuzzy. from Hal E. Fulton on 2001-10-31 at 10:12:02: > Question re: the Cygwin/MinGW discussion. > > If we go the MinGW route, what happens? > 1. Do we simply *lose* fork and popen? > 2. Or do we re-implement them, then switch? > 3. Or do we switch, then re-implement them? > > Hal > > I'd hate to see a situation where a program > has a comment saying "this works on all > platforms except Win32, unless you > use the *old* installation, and then it will > work." > > Hal -- Eli Green