io.popen (and close)

[nr@... (Norman Ramsey)]

I know that io.popen is a poor stepchild---undocumented and unloved
but useful on Unix platforms nevertheless.  (Actually I notice that as
of Lua 5.1 it is evern documented.)  To make io.open even more useful,
I would like to be able to get the exit status returned by pclose(3).
I notice that the specification says only that file:close() returns
a non-nil value on success.  Would it be possible to change the
specification (and implementation) so that if f = io.popen(...),
then f:close() returns the exit status?  What do the Lua team think?


Norman