From: Brian Candler <B.Candler@...>
Date: 2003-02-27T19:50:39+09:00
Subject: Re: Threads, pipes, popen, whatever

On Thu, Feb 27, 2003 at 06:57:18PM +0900, Michael Shigorin wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 25, 2003 at 05:52:08PM +0900, Robert Klemme wrote:
> > Normally you would use IO.popen but I can't see a way to access
> > the exit status of the process directly.
> 
> $? won't work?

It does appear to work as advertised:

  f = IO.popen("/usr/bin/false","w")
  f.write "ignoreme"
  f.close
  puts $?    #>> 256

It would be nice if the status hung around as an instance variable of f
though. It would also be nice if you didn't have to split it into
WEXITSTATUS and WTERMSIG by hand: e.g.

  puts $?.exited?      # WIFEXITED
  puts $?.exitstatus   # WEXITSTATUS
  puts $?.termsig      # WTERMSIG        etc

But it looks like $? is actually just a Fixnum, in 1.6.8 anyway.

Regards,

Brian.