Doesn't anybody write to paper anymore?

[David Fisher]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Alan Gauld" <alan.gauld at gssec.bt.co.uk>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.python
To: <python-list at python.org>
Sent: Thursday, May 04, 2000 10:41 AM
Subject: Re: Doesn't anybody write to paper anymore?


> > > I couldn't get popen to work at a;ll on NT4 or win95
> >
> > os.popen() has been working fine for me on my NT4 systems (SP4 and
> > SP5) to run all sort of sub-processes - what sort of failures have you
> > been having?
>
> I got either an error message 'no such process?' or nothing
> at all back. But I just tried it again from a DOS box on NT4
> and it worked perfectly. Hmmm, I'll try again from my home
> PC on W95.
>
> I wonder what I did wrong last time...

The difference is having a console window open.  The people at Microsoft
made an erroneous assumption, in designing the win32 api, that the process
calling _popen() would have an open console window associated with it.  And
apparently this assumption is so integral there's no easy way to unfutz it.
Search the Microsoft site for _popen to see an article about the problem and
some work-around code.

dnf