From: Ronald Pijnacker <rhp@...>
Date: 2003-07-17T15:56:19+09:00
Subject: Re: system, `` or exec on Windows?

> Hi,
> 
> At Tue, 15 Jul 2003 17:46:31 +0900,
> Ronald Pijnacker wrote:
> > - execute a child process
> > - get the output written to stdout and stderr (as with `<command>`)
> > - also get the exit code ($?)
> > - in a thread safe way
> 
> If you run on NT,
> 
>   IO.popen("your-command 2>&1") {|f|
>     output = f.read
>     exitcode = Process.waitpid2(f.pid)[1]
>   }
> 
> > On unix I would probably revert to using a pipe, fork and waitpid2. 
> > However, fork does not seem to be available (understandably) on Windows. 
> > Any other options I missed?
> 
> I'd like to add arguments specifying redirection to system,
> popen etc. for portability, but don't have nice notation yet.
> 
> > Is $? thread safe?
> 
> Yes.  $? is a thread local variable.

Thanks! This was just what I was looking for. I wonder why I missed
this in the documentation. The f.pid part supprised me a bit though...

   Ronald.