From UNIX to Win NT

[Gordon McMillan]

Thomas Thiele wrote: 

>>
>> You've got both technical and cultural problems here. There is no
>> fork. 
>
>I knew that. But I wonder how to start an other program. In UNIX I used
>fork() and exec().
>Just the same code like in popen2.popen3 but I copied the code and
>included some costumization.
>Does popen work on NT? Or is there an other way do get the same result
>(starting a program and
>read it's output)

All of the c runtime ways of starting processes have problems from annoying 
to catastrophic on Windows. The best of the lot is probably os.execv. 
os.popen works between well-behaved console processes on NT. If you want 
fine-grained control (including dup'ing your file descriptors etc.), use 
Win32process.CreateProcess from the Win32 extensions. Win32pipe.popen* use 
it to emulate os.popen*.

But the real question is why are you doing this? While it's a common and 
reasonably efficient way of doing things on *nix, it is both rare and very 
expensive on Windows.